Tag: Maurice Isserman

Meanwhile, dozens of D.C.-area students have already staged a “die-in” outside of the White House — and more are in the works — and national school walkout days are planned for March and April. With the U.S. national voting age at 18, such actions are one of the few ways available for most high-school students to make their voices heard at the national political level. As Amy Campbell-Oates, a 16-year-old who organized a protest at South Broward High School near Parkland, told the New York Times, “Some of us can’t vote yet but we want to get to the people that can.” And, while the platforms that young people are using to speak out may be new, there’s a long history of Americans who were too young to vote shifting the national conversation on social and political issues. A Children’s Crusade In fact, because the national voting age wasn’t lowered to 18 until 1971, it’s worth remembering that a fair amount of the most memorable civil rights and antiwar protests of the 1960s were staged by people who couldn’t vote yet. But children — children much younger than 18 — were also part of the history of activism before that point. During that episode, dozens of children were among the marchers who followed Jones from Philadelphia to New York to protest labor conditions, earning the event the moniker of the “children’s crusade.” (The name comes from a 13th century youth movement.) The Brown ruling, argues Rebecca de Schweinitz, a professor of History at Brigham Young University and author of If We Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality, put “school children at the center of the nation’s struggle for racial equality.” In explaining why she had to act when she did, Johns quoted the Bible: “Our parents ask us to follow them,” a classmate later recalled her saying at the time, “but in some instances…a little child shall lead them.” People too young to vote played a key role in the movement in the years to follow — for example, four college freshmen led 1960’s famous Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in — and soon Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow activists realized another unique role that children could play in their movement. Inspired by the student protests at Berkeley, student demonstrations spread at campuses nationwide, especially as the war in Vietnam escalated. Along with the War in Vietnam — which led to the refrain “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” — recognition of that generation’s high level of formal schooling and civic education was a factor that led to the movement to lower the voting age to 18. Bettmann / Getty Images What Comes Next It’s too soon to tell what kind of impact the survivors of the school shooting in Parkland will have on the national gun-control debate, but American history suggests that there are two sides to the matter.