As a resident of Washington, D.C., the signs of the upcoming America 250 celebrations are all around. The construction of the Ultimate Fighting Championship fighting cage on the White House grounds. Banners on federal buildings. The cancellation of the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival in favor of the Freedom 250 Concert and the Great American State Fair on the National Mall.
The signs of America’s drift towards authoritarianism are everywhere too: efforts to build an ICE detention center in the low-income community of Congress Heights “East of the River” where I used to live; unemployed federal workers in my extended network of parent friends; maybe most disturbing, the lingering presence of National Guard troops on the metro and in the streets. These troops are the crushing daily reminder of the ongoing efforts to condition us to accept a visible military presence in our community.
In this context, we are all called upon to reflect on this nation’s history of injustice and what have been the forces that have dismantled injustice. Democracy in the US has never been delivered top-down—it has been demanded, shaped, and expanded by movements that act from the bottom up. Among the many untold stories in American history is the role of young people as central, but who have been historically erased actors.
Youth are not just future leaders; they have always been present-tense architects of change. Youth-led movements, often headed by Black, Brown, immigrant, and marginalized young people, have consistently pushed democracy forward.
And America’s 250th is an opportune time to learn history, not the sanitized version propagated by the current administration, but real history, the history that most of us were not taught in school.
The Young Negro Cooperative League
“The young people are the hope of any movement.”
Ella Baker
The life, work, and words of Ella Baker are some of my greatest inspirations in the work I do as the executive director of the National Collaborative for Transformative Youth Policy. A lesser known leader of the Civil Rights movement, Baker believed deeply in the power of youth leadership and grassroots organizing.
While still a young person herself, Baker was the force behind the Young Negro Cooperative League, an effort to achieve economic justice in Black communities through cooperative ownership of basic necessities like groceries. Membership was limited to young people ages 18–35, with plans to train even younger people in cooperative approaches through “Children’s Guilds.” She led the development of an ambitious five-year plan to train 5000 youth in cooperative methods, launch cooperative grocery stores and credit unions, and eventually control the means of production through cooperative wholesale outlets, a cooperative factory—even a fully-financed college.
“I went to school, I had friends, and I went to jail. I thought that’s what kids did.”
At its peak, the Young Negro Cooperative League had 400 members and local councils in 22 communities. Although the organization only officially existed for three years, its lasting legacy of community-owned businesses, support for Black-owned businesses, and youth-led community organizing offer essential lessons about young people’s role in pursuing economic justice.
The Battle for Voting Rights
“We were consistent. We didn’t march one day and stop. I went to jail nine times!”
Joanne Bland
I recently visited the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites in Montgomery, AL. One of the sites is Montgomery Square, a public park focusing on the city’s role in the civil rights movement. A building in the park was playing a documentary about the battle for voting rights, as told by survivors of Bloody Sunday, the confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where peaceful protesters were viciously attacked by law enforcement. Many know that a young John Lewis was on that bridge, but so were numerous other young people, including Joanne Bland and her sister. What stuck with me from their interviews was the way that participating in the movement was a normalized part of their childhoods. Bland noted in the documentary, “I went to school, I had friends, and I went to jail. I thought that’s what kids did.”
The deep commitment from everyday people, especially young people, provided the on-the-ground force that ultimately brought us the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
South Africa Divestment
“There is always work that needs to be done. So, when you have these goals that you think are transformative, it behooves you to also figure out what happens the day after.”
Pearl Robinson
I first learned about the South Africa divestment movement on once central episode of the 1980s TV series, A Different World. In it, South African exchange students were part of the cast at the fictional Hillman College, where their Black American cast mates strategized and protested to force the college to divest from a fictional soda company that did business in South Africa.
The fictional Hillman students reflected the real deep organizing work that was happening on campuses across the country over the course of more than a decade. Through a combination of sit-ins, campus-based encampments, political education, strategic arrests, and hunger strikes, students helped build the pressure to not only force individual campuses to divest, but for the US Congress to vote to implement sanctions against the South African government, ultimately creating the economic pressure that caused the apartheid regime to collapse.
This is perhaps the most recent example of sustained student-led organizing driving not only policy change in the United States but supporting global movements for justice. Community economic power. Voting rights. Bringing down systemic racial injustice. This is the legacy of young people across the 20th century.
The 21st century has looked quite different. I was in community with a young leader recently, who made a statement that gave me pause: “Today’s young people have never experienced a win.”
As someone who is always talking about the essential role of young people in policy and systems change, I sat with that statement and concluded that he is correct. Not to say that there have been no wins—young people have had some amazing successes at the local and state levels on immigration, removing police from schools, environmental justice, and more. But the last major win that young people achieved nationwide may very well be the South Africa divestment movement: outside of the lifetime of today’s young people.
The history of youth-led movements turning local wins into state and national wins is as old as the youth-led movement itself.
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Features Driving the Challenges
What has changed? Why haven’t we been able to translate state and local wins to nationwide change? Why are so many youth-led movements stalled and stuck at the very moment that we need them most?
There are three core features of the 21st-century philanthropic and nonprofit space that I believe are driving the challenges that youth-led movements are experiencing today:
- Movement Capture
Defined by researcher and author Megan Ming Francis as “the practice by which private philanthropy uses its influence to shape the agenda and strategies of vulnerable civil rights organizations,” movement capture has a long history. In the 1930s and 1940s, the NAACP was strongly focused on campaigns to end lynching and racial terror in the South. It was philanthropy that used dollars to nudge the organization to focus on school desegregation instead. That is not to say that school desegregation wasn’t important and necessary work, but these investments effectively killed the anti-lynching work.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex details the way that philanthropic dollars were used in the post-civil rights era to dismantle the more radical and youth-led civil rights organizations, in favor of groups that worked towards more incremental change. More recently, we have seen the commitments to funding racial justice work in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd disappear without reaching Black-led movements who wanted systems change. As Ming Francis and Erica Kohl-Arenas wrote for The Forge, “Foundation leaders wanted racial justice on their own performative terms; change, but not so much as to upend the entire system.”
Investment in youth-led movements has also fit this pattern. The signature strategy of activist groups like March for Our Lives, the Sunrise Movement, and Black Lives Matter was disruptive, nonviolent protest—tactics aligned with our youth-led movement ancestors in the fight for voting rights and South Africa divestment. These organizations and many others experienced a surge of philanthropic dollars, I would argue with a secret agenda of getting young people out of the streets and into professionalized nonprofits. Once this goal had been met, the funding trends reversed, leaving these organizations, and countless lesser-known initiatives, struggling to advance their transformational agendas.
We’ve gone from “not so much change as to upend the entire system” to, effectively, no change at all.
- Lack of Coordinated Strategy
While visiting Montgomery, I was struck by the level and depth of strategic thinking that movement leaders engaged in, and the degree to which different strategies were advanced in concert to achieve change. Efforts to desegregate involved the organized mass action of the Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, or the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, in coordination with legal action, policy advocacy, and legislative change.
We saw the development of long-term visionary strategic planning and economic pressure in the Young Negroes Cooperative League. We saw the South African divestment movement also lean into economic pressure but coupled with political education and policy strategy. While the leaders of these different strategies did not necessarily all agree, they did see value in each other’s respective lanes and understood the value of multiple strategies advancing a common goal.
Our 21st century youth-led movements lack coordinated strategy and tactics. Movements have become siloed and disconnected, not only by issue area but by strategy. Rather than working in tandem, the grassroots ground game is separate from the litigation strategy, which is separate from the policy advocacy strategy. We don’t even get to legislation. And the different strategies are positioning and competing for scarce resources, rather than working together as a movement. The lawyers do their lawyer thing, and the grassroots folks do the grassroots thing, and the policy wonks do their policy wonk thing—and we wonder why none of us quite get to where we’re trying to get.
- National Infrastructure to Translate and Sustain Local Hard-Fought Victories into National Wins and Implementation
The place where youth-led movements have continued to see wins is largely at the local level. Much of the Civil Rights era organizing started locally—in Montgomery, in Selma—and then spread to other places. The Young Negro Cooperative League launched in New York City before spreading to other states. The South Africa divestment movement also launched in New York before widening coast to coast. The history of youth-led movements turning local wins into state and national wins is as old as the youth-led movement itself.
If the last 18 months have taught us anything, it is that anything done can be undone.
We also saw that the work didn’t end with legislative change. Wins had to be tested and sustained in the implementation phase. The Supreme Court ruled that the interstate bus system had to be desegregated, and the Freedom Riders risked their lives to see that the law was enforced. The Voting Rights Act passed, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members organized voter registration drives across the South. There was a clear understanding that the work wasn’t over when new policy was enacted; in political scientist Pearl Robinson’s words, “It behooves you to figure out what happens the day after.”
What is different now is massive divestment from national infrastructure. I appreciate philanthropy’s growing commitment to invest in local communities, local organizing, and place-based strategy. Having come into the national policy space from a local direct service organization, the funding disparity was (and is) breathtaking. However, we need to make these local investments along with, not instead of, investments in national infrastructure.
We can’t win justice for all young people one community at a time. Some communities, left to their own devices, will never do the right thing. The only way that we can convert local wins into national justice is through national infrastructure to build bridges across communities, share learnings and possibilities, and coordinate strategy. We also must sustain resources through implementation. If the last 18 months have taught us anything, it is that anything done can be undone. We must do the work to sustain the wins, even as we launch new battles.
Why I Still Believe in the Essential Role of Youth Movements
I have come to believe that the efforts to disconnect us from the lineage of our movement ancestors is intentional, in service of some of the trends that we see today. The three youth-led movements that I’ve highlighted here are only three of many. Today’s activists must engage deeply with historic youth-led movements to strengthen our analysis and strategy today.
It is also an appropriate and necessary time for nonprofits and philanthropy to audit their own role in the cooptation of youth-led movements. The term “radical” has been weaponized on both the right and the left as an epithet. I embrace instead the term in the definitional sense of “getting to the root.” Young people’s demands for change have always been focused on getting to the root of our collective challenges. We need to invest boldly and unapologetically in radical solutions, because these solutions are essential to the preservation of democracy.
The question remains: Is the sector ready for a reckoning around movement capture and the ways that philanthropy and nonprofits leverage power and resources to diminish young people’s dreams of freedom? Because the time to shift resources and real power is now.
Finally, we must embrace discomfort as a democratic practice. When I was in Montgomery, Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the Legacy Sites said, “We are living in a time where we are being called upon to do things that are uncomfortable and inconvenient.”
It was not comfortable, nor was it convenient, for members of the Young Negro Cooperative League to launch cooperative grocery stores at the height of the Great Depression. It was not comfortable for civil rights marchers to face tear gas and police brutality on their quest for freedom and voting rights. It was not convenient for student protesters in the South Africa divestment movement to face disciplinary action from their schools and arrest.
Across movements, young people have experienced real collective trauma. Transformational change is hard, sometimes dangerous, and by necessity, disruptive. To quote Stevenson again, “The challenge is not opting to do something easier.” Our collective future depends on it.
We must publicly commit to youth-led agendas, and protect, not police, youth-led disruption. We must invest in strategy development and national infrastructure in tandem with local efforts. We must do it over enough time to actually see change come to fruition. And we must value investment in collective healing practices, community, and joy to mitigate the types of traumas experienced by prior generations. The future of democracy will not be written by those who manage it, but by those bold enough to reimagine it.
And for 250 years, that has been young people.
