Five Times Young People Changed the World

Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation were still in effect in the American South on Feb. 1, 1960, when four young men walked into a Woolworth's department store in Greensboro, North Carolina and, as they had carefully planned, sat down at a whites-only lunch counter and ordered coffee. They were refused service.

The four black men — three teenagers and one who had just turned 20, all freshmen students at the nearby Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University) — stayed until the store closed. The next day, more students showed up and, again, were not served. By the fourth day, some 300 people crowded the store waiting for a seat at the counter.

So-called "sit-ins" had been staged before. But the Woolworth's sit-in is credited with civil rights protests that spread throughout the South. By the end of March 1960, peaceful protests had been staged in 55 cities in 13 states.

That single act of civil disobedience in Greensboro also prompted the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the earliest and most effective civil rights groups of the decade. The SNCC was instrumental in organizing (among other events) more sit-ins, the famed Freedom Rides and the 1963 March on Washington (in which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream ..." speech).

The daughter of a teacher, Malala Yousafzai was just 10 years old in 2007 when the Taliban seized control of her home region in northwest Pakistan. The next year, the group banned all girls from going to school.

According to UN Women, the United Nations watchdog organization that is "dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women," of the world's 796 million illiterate people, two-thirds are women. Worldwide, only 39 percent of girls who live in rural areas attend secondary schools, compared to 45 percent of boys. In urban areas, 59 percent of girls (and 60 percent of boys) go to secondary schools.

Malala began blogging for the BBC about life under the Taliban and her desire to return to school, but she and her family were forced to flee their home as the Pakistani army returned to the area to fight off the Taliban. The national army was successful, but the Taliban still controlled many rural areas. Malala continued her very public fight for education rights and, in 2012, when she was just 15, masked gunmen boarded her school bus and shot her in the head.

Malala survived, but she and her family moved to England, where she returned to school in 2013 and continued her fight for girls' rights to education. In 2014, at the age of 17, Malala became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She's now a student at the University of Oxford and continues to travel globally in support of women's rights.

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is the youth director for the environmental group Earth Guardians. He's 16. He's been fighting for his cause for a decade.

Climate change is still a major threat to the planet, scientists overwhelmingly agree. But Xiuhtezcatl (pronounced "shoe-tez-caht") is meeting it, and its detractors, head on. He's traveled the globe urging young people to get involved, given speeches at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro and to the United Nations in New York, and is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the federal government for its failure to protect the environment for future generations.

The lawsuit calls for the government to "develop a national plan to restore Earth's energy balance, and implement that national plan so as to stabilize the climate system ... before it is too late."

Xiuhtezcatl is the son of an Aztec father and a mother who is dedicated to environmental causes. He may be young, but he insists, he's not alone.

"I'm seeing more and more youth getting involved and trying to make a difference. It's really tough because there are a lot of road blocks, but definitely my generation are becoming more and more rebellious against a system that's setting us up for failure," he told Huck Magazine. "Young people are realising that the system we're living in doesn't work."

Jasilyn Charger had moved home to the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota in 2015, a 19-year-old dealing with the suicides of some of her Lakota Sioux friends and looking to help. She and her friend, Joseph White Eyes, pulled together some friends and mentors and formed what eventually became known as the One Mind Youth Movement.

The group originally raised money for trips and counseling and basketball tournaments. But, as detailed by Saul Elbein in The New York Times, One Mind soon turned to more political efforts, campaigning against the Keystone XL Pipeline in 2015 and, in 2016, starting a camp in the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. "The youths came to believe that the Dakota pipeline was not only a threat to their drinking water," Elbein writes in the Times, "but also a harbinger of the larger environmental crisis their generation was set to inherit."

The protest at Standing Rock became a protest against corporate greed and for Native American rights, too, and at times drew thousands of protesters. In December 2016, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the Obama administration, denied an easement to continue construction of the pipeline on its current route. The protesters cheered.

Less than two months later, however, newly elected President Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing the construction to continue. On June 1, 2017, the first oil flowed through the pipeline.

Court battles continue to try to shut down the line. And the One Mind Youth Movement's work endures.

"It is a common belief among our people that the children literally are the future. They are the sacred seeds of our ancestors, inherently instilled with the values passed down through generations," the group's site states. "We have to water them and they will blossom into the sacred flowers of life they are."

Teens like Madison Kimrey have long been active on many fronts. Kimrey, a 16-year-old from Burlington, North Carolina, says she is passionate about "voting rights, women's issues, LGBTQ+ rights, and the humane treatment of animals."

She's keenly aware of what the students in Florida are trying to do to stop gun violence in schools and what they and others face in trying to change the world.

"It's the actions we take when the marches are over and the media has moved on that are going to make the real difference in improving people's lives," Kimrey posted on Facebook Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, "and electing representatives at every level who are interested in moving forward with solutions to the problems we face."

Kimrey first raised her voice when she saw a same-sex couple denied family rates at a Jacksonville, Florida museum. She took on former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory in 2013 over what she and many others saw as restrictive voting rules that targeted young people and minorities. She was especially disturbed by a provision in the law that prohibited 16- and 17-year-olds from pre-registering to vote.

"I didn't like what I saw happening to my state," Kimrey told civil rights activist Al Sharpton on MSNBC, "so I wanted to take action and see what I could do to stop it."

Kimrey continues to speak out and make her voice heard, urging young people to get out and vote to enact the change that older people won't.

And, like others her age, she's just getting started.

"When all of us get older and we take over the political system," she told the Huffington Post, "it's going to be completely different."