5 times student protesters were on the right side of history

On April 17, Columbia University students pitched 50 tents on their campus. From this ‘Liberated Zone,’ they called on the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, whose forces are responsible for killing 35,000 Palestinians and wounding over 77,000 since October. The next day, the university suspended over 100 students. Undeterred, students refused to leave their encampment and instead stuck to their demands. College administrators called the police to arrest over 100 Columbia students in response.

Since then, pro-Palestine student protests have spread across America, the UK, France and Germany. Dozens of well-respected institutions, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, UCLA, Warwick University and Sorbonne University, are being pressured to cut ties with Israel. The students say they are protesting their universities’ complicity in genocide.

Instead of listening to the students, academic establishments invite riot police to quell the non-violent protests. Last week, journalists at Indiana University shared photos of what they claimed were snipers on a roof. Police officers have also used tear gas and tasers during protest crackdowns. Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets continue to belittle the student protests, while young people’s calls to end genocide are labelled juvenile.

Yet student protesters have frequently stood on the right side of history. Whether resisting racial or gender injustice, inequality, authoritarianism, or climate change, young people have often led movements that were catalysts of much-needed social change. Fringe movements only move into the mainstream when a handful of people are courageous enough to protest for their cause. More often than not, they put their lives on the line. In the moment, critics label them as ‘troublemakers’ or ‘naive’, but they’re rightly remembered as heroes in history books.

The latest pro-Palestine student protests are embedded within a broader record of youth activism advocating for social justice and human rights. Here are some of the most successful student protests in recent history:

The Soweto Uprising

The Apartheid in South Africa was introduced by the National Party after it came into power in 1948. The all-white government – a minority group, mostly descendants of European settlers – implemented laws upholding racial segregation and white supremacy, which expanded on discriminatory colonial practices. 

When Afrikaans (the language spoken predominantly by Dutch settlers) was introduced in Black schools as a “language of instruction”, children in Orlando West Junior School in Soweto refused to go to school in protest. This resistance culminated in nearly 20,000 Black students walking out from their schools on 16 June 1976 to protest having to learn Afrikaans in school. The protest spread to other parts of the country and lasted a few days. To quell the protest, the police released dogs and shot directly at children, killing at least 176 people and injuring over a thousand.

As a result, the apartheid government suffered a crisis of legitimacy and the Soweto Uprising is credited in helping dismantle the apartheid in 1994. June 16 is now celebrated as Youth Day, which is a public holiday in South Africa.

The Greensboro Sit-Ins

The Greensboro Four were four young Black students who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in North Carolina on 1 February 1960. Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond refused to leave the premises because despite purchasing toothpaste, a notebook and a hairbrush from a desegregated counter, they were denied service when asking for coffee and doughnuts at the lunch counter. The four freshmen students stayed in the shop until it closed that night.

The following day, more university students joined their non-violent act of protest after being refused service again. Eventually, more than a thousand protesters packed themselves into the store despite facing opposition from white supremacists.

Not only did Greensboro businesses desegregate lunch counters in the aftermath, but the Greensboro Sit-in inspired the sit-in movement in 55 other cities, eventually leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandated desegregation in public.

The Mexican Movement of 1968

Days before the 1968 Summer Olympics began in Mexico, around 10,000 school and university students gathered to protest the authoritarian rule of the ruling government, inequality, political censorship, and corruption. The protest was violently suppressed by the government and resulted in the Tlatelolco Massacre, where an estimated 300-400 people died and over a thousand were injured. Three years later, another 120 student demonstrators were killed by a government-trained paramilitary group in the infamous Corpus Christi Massacre. 

The tragic and violent human rights violations meant that both events caused an unavoidable distrust in the government and paved the way for democratic reforms in the years to come. “[1968] transformed universities, massively expanded higher education, incorporated new critical thinking into the social sciences, generated activists, opened the doors to new ideas such as feminism or sexual diversity,” Martí Bartes, interim head of Mexico City’s government, recently said of the student movement.

The Velvet Revolution

The Soviet Union and four of its Warsaw Pact allies invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia proposed democratic reforms. Under Soviet Pressure, all reforms were repealed, and the ruling party was taken over by a more authoritarian wing. Soviet leaders feared that liberalisation would spark unrest in other parts of Eastern Europe and fracture unity within the bloc.

Eventually, decades of dissatisfaction with the communist regime and economic strife fueled mass discontent in Czechoslovakia. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, protests initially organised by students in Prague quickly gained momentum, gathering support from the general population. The communist government attempted to suppress the protest but ultimately was unable to. The government resigned, and the country transitioned to a parliamentary democracy, with free elections held in June 1990.

School Strike for Climate

School Strike for Climate, also known as Fridays for Future, began in 2018 when Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, skipped school every Friday to protest outside the Swedish Parliament. Soon, other young people joined her cause, spreading the Fridays for Future movement internationally. At its height, four million protesters, many of them schoolchildren, participated in demonstrations worldwide.

Though Thunberg later said that the school climate strikes “achieved nothing” and the fight for climate justice is very much ongoing, the school strikes revolutionised the climate movement. They increased awareness of climate change and strengthened international solidarity. More importantly, they added pressure on governments to make net-zero commitments.