Young People Who Shook the Pillars of Heaven
The activists of Parkland, Florida aren’t the first teens and students who have dared the impossible
History is a funny thing. Most of the events that make the textbooks are the result of planning and effort by adults. Revolutions take decades, cultural movements build for years, battles take long preparation — and all this is done by adults who usually have a great deal of experience and preparation before “making their move.’
Sometimes, however, something special happens. Sometimes young people surprise everyone by taking the lead in demanding change.
In February 2018, a lone gunman walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and began shooting people. The mass murder took the lives of seventeen people, most of them students, and fifteen were sent to hospital, making it one of the worst school shootings in history. In the aftermath, the familiar script began to play out: cries of anger and horror that such things happen, accompanied by demands that action be taken to prevent a recurrence, followed by complete paralysis as politicians offered “hopes and prayers” before expressing the belief that nothing could be done to prevent such attacks. It had happened after nightmare shootings like Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook; somehow these incidents had become normalized, treated as inevitable.
But after Parkland, things were different. Students of the school ignored the paralysis and began speaking frequently and forcefully on the need to take action, especially in hampering the easy access to assault-style weapons. They directly challenged the National Rifle Association, an organization with so much political power that few politicians have dared to so much as murmur a negative word in their direction.
Young people protested, gave interviews, attended town halls, and in general showed a degree of leadership that shook an apathetic nation to the core. Despite being fresh from a trauma likely to alter their lives forever, they challenged the most entrenched powers in American society.
This is not the first time that young people have dared to challenge powers that had long seemed mighty and invincible. Here are just five examples of such brave activism:
Soweto, South Africa, 1976
By the mid-1970s, the Apartheid regime in South Africa was deeply entrenched. The white minority — only around 16% of the population — dominated the black majority through racist, oppressive laws designed to keep the races separate and prevent black people from attaining political or economic power. In just one of many Apartheid laws, the government ordered black high school students to be taught in English and Afrikaans — the language of the oppressor. In a surprise response, black high schoolers in the poor township of Soweto began protesting the move. Braving riot police, attack dogs and snipers, these students continued resisting. An estimated 20,000 young people joined the protests, which were eventually ended through extreme police brutality (as many as 700 students might have been killed).
These protests did not immediately end Apartheid, but the demonstrations lit a fire by showing South Africans what determined nonviolent resistance could accomplish. After the Soweto Uprising, protests became common in South Africa, giving no rest to the oppressors and putting severe pressure on them internationally. Eventually Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 and Apartheid came to an end.
Tiananmen Square Protests, 1989
The government of China was, and is, all-powerful. The ruling communist party has never allowed dissent, with even mild resistance getting labeled “counter-revolutionary” and all but guaranteeing a brutal prison sentence (or execution) for anyone daring to challenge the party’s rule. In 1989, however, something astonishing happened: students took to the streets to demand democracy. China had launched economic reforms in the late 1970s, allowing a degree of economic freedom — the ability to engage in business and trade — that had not been known before. Political freedom, however, was still denied. Students in Beijing believed the time was right to change that and start the transition to democracy.
Students in Beijing began peacefully gathering in Tiananmen Square, in the heart of the government district, and protested in favor of democracy. The government was paralyzed, unsure of how to react. Meanwhile the protests grew, not just in Beijing but nationwide. Finally, as they saw their overthrow becoming a very real possibility, the leaders of the government responded in force, sending the army to violently crush the protests. It’s hard to know how many were killed in the crackdown, but some estimates range as high as 10,000. The protests did not bring democracy to China, but it left the government on notice that its power was no longer absolute.
The Freedom Riders, United States, 1961
When most people think about the civil rights movement, the picture great leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr and the protests they led. The movement was indeed a huge, sophisticated operation that spanned the country and organized activities in almost every county in the South. There was one movement, however, that was organized and led by young people: the Freedom Rides. Before 1961, the US Supreme Court ruled that passenger buses (and bus stations) in the South could no longer be segregated. The bus companies and southern leaders, however, refused to integrate those bus lines. It was a major issue at the time because buses were an important means of transportation, so a group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (usually shortened to SNCC) decided to tackle this injustice.
Young people trained one another to take vile insults they knew were coming their way without responding. They also learned how to remain passive even while being beaten because it was a purely nonviolent protest — the goal was to expose the violence underpinning segregation. They bought their bus tickets and intentionally broke the laws keeping white and black separated. Both white students and black students participated. They took huge risks: the Ku Klux Klan, a racist terrorist organization, openly threatened to murder these kids. In the event, extremist mobs did brutalize the protesters, sometimes boarding buses and beating them severely where they sat. When taken to hospital, doctors often refused to treat them. Despite all this suffering, the freedom riders persisted. They knew very well that each ride could result in their deaths, but they courageously kept going, week after week, throughout 1961. In the end they succeeded in desegregating the bus lines, as well as exposing, once and for all, the racist brutality so common in the south. Mostly forgotten today — perhaps because they worked together rather than follow a speech-making leader — the Freedom Rides gave a massive boost to America’s civil rights movement.
The White Rose Movement, Germany, 1942
In all the history of the human race, it’s hard to think of a government more brutal, more vicious, and more dangerous to oppose than Nazi Germany. The Nazis maintained a terror state, employing secret police, show trials, endless propaganda and concentration camps to stay in power. By 1942, the regime was at its peak, having conquered almost all of Europe — and looked set to dominate the world. Protests were unknown in Nazi Germany. Not only were dissidents afraid for their lives, they likely saw no point in resisting. A small group of students in Munich, Germany, were sick of hearing terrible stories of German war crimes from their friends in the army. While generals and politicians dithered over whether to resist Adolf Hitler, these amazing kids, who had deep religious faith and a sophisticated understanding of philosophy, simply could not sit still. Organizing into a secret group they called the White Rose, they began writing amazing leaflets slamming the Nazi regime and its many crimes. The leaflets, which were plastered all over Munich, called on Germans to rise up.
These students knew full well they were almost certain to be killed for their actions. They knew they had almost no chance of overthrowing Hitler. They were simply determined to speak up for what was right, to be a voice of justice in a dark time. As one of the members of the group said, they were willing to die in order to do what was right: “We will not be silent,” they said in one of their pamphlets, a phrase that has been adopted by revolutionaries and activists the world over. In the end, they did not overthrow Hitler — or even put a dent in his regime. They were arrested, put on trial and executed, showing calm courage from beginning to end. These young people are still held up today, especially in Germany, as shining examples of courage and faith — of fighting for justice even if it meant certain death.
Worldwide, 1968
Some people think of the protests of the late 1960s as being confined to the United States and being all about the Vietnam War. This is not true. There were many anti-war protests, of course, but the truth is that 1968 saw a massive movement of young people fighting for a great many causes. In Prague, in what is today the Czech Republic, young people took to the streets to peacefully resist an invasion by Soviet troops tasked with crushing a reform movement; Massive protests in France brought the country to a standstill and ended up transforming French society; in West Germany, young people condemned the hypocrisy of their government, which employed many former Nazis and which still resisted a full accounting of the nation’s crimes in the Second World War; in Mexico, students faced massacre as they demanded an end to single-party rule; in the US, protests resisted the Vietnam War but also sparked the modern environmental movement, and took feminism to the streets.
Though rarely discussed nowadays, it’s impossible to underestimate the influence this wave of protests had on the world. Even in the 21st Century, we continue to feel their effects. It was like a sudden wildfire that came out of nowhere and swept across the planet.
