We teach to prepare our young people for their future—hopefully, for a better future. We teach to impart skills and knowledge. We nurture and support our students to help them build relationships and resilience. We teach them to dream. To think. To engage. To act. To make a difference.
To lead. And, often, our students teach us. Students have led some of the most powerful and effective movements for social change. Sixty years ago, the students who sat down at a lunch counter in a North Carolina five-and-dime store galvanized a national movement.
Now students and young people are raising their voices in nationwide protests to demand an end to police brutality and for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer.
We also recognize the deep frustration and anger that people feel—both young and old—as a new generation of young African Americans watch the violence of modern-day lynchings and brutality by police. You have responded, peacefully and nonviolently, throughout the nation.
Martin Luther King Jr. Students and young people throughout the South stood together to wield the weapon of nonviolence and civil disobedience. Through their solidarity and persistence, they were able to challenge and overturn nearly a century of Jim Crow laws that forced Black men, women and children to live as second-class citizens. When their peaceful actions were met with extreme violence and police brutality, students and youth activists persisted. In early May of , thousands of schoolchildren left their classrooms and headed to downtown Birmingham, Ala.
