The Spark of Youth
When it became clear that the civil rights movement had not quite managed to drag segregation behind the barn and shoot it to death, others stepped in and picked up the fight. SONG created some room to move in the vital crawl spaces across the South in the 1990s, modeling intersectional organizing that would come to full bloom in the 2010s. The Ella Baker Center in Oakland has spent the better part of three decades figuring out how to grow successive generations of youth organizers to redirect public monies toward education, not prison. Youth immigrant organizers have taught the nation to value family emancipation and reunification as an essential right. The Movement for Black Lives and youth water protectors at Standing Rock have shined a brilliant spotlight on the mounting reality of government and corporate authoritarianism—surveillance, beating, shooting, warrantless taps, repeat arrests, mass incarceration. All of these organizations have advanced visions for a just and open society, doing so where adult society has dismally failed. In each case, it has been young people, not corporations or established parties or law enforcement, who pushed the nation a step further toward its self-proclaimed ideal of “liberty and justice for all.”