There are many ways to protest through art: through the visual medium, through literature, through music. Jo Rippon’s book in collaboration with Amnesty International addresses the art of protest through posters created to address inequality across six specific categories: gender; civil rights; LGBTQ rights; refugee and immigrant rights; peace; and the environment. Rippon offers a history of protest posters, and by choosing to have a foreward by Mari Copeny (read about her here – she sounds like an amazing kid!), the young activist who wrote to Obama about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the book is also a call and support for youth activism.   

Youth activism surrounds us, from Malala Yousafzai (women’s rights and girls’ education); to Greta Thunberg (TIME person of the year in 2019) and Jamie Margolin/ Zero Hour (climate and environmental justice); to the Parkland shooting survivors, the March for OurLives and the #Neveragain movement (gun control); to these young Black LGBTQ activists; to name just a very few. (Parents, if you haven’t watched Pose yet, starring Indya Moore, I highly recommend it. It is definitely not for young kids). The most recent passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the powerful effect she and her life story had on young feminists, is evidenced by this list of books and other “stuff” (from toddler to adult). The youth of today are getting involved in the world’s most significant political issues. They are making their voices heard. This is very much the premise for Good Trouble For Kids! We want kids from the earliest ages to recognize that they have a role to play in art and activism, in reading for resistance, in poetry and protest.

In the time of Covid, many families may not feel comfortable taking to the streets to engage in protest, but Rise Up! shows there are many ways to get involved and the vast numbers of organizations out there. When my kids were little, we set an intention for one night of Hannukah to make a family donation and let our girls help pick a cause. It is an easy way to get children interested even at a very young age (I remember them loving looking at Heifer’s website!) As they got older, they picked their own organizations, and began to make donations with their own money. I think the best gift my daughter got for her Bat Mitzvah was a card with two checks in it – one made out to her for $ 18 and the other left blank for $ 18, giving her the responsibility to donate to an organization of her choice. There are many families I know who have their kids donate a percentage of their Bar/Bat Mitzvah and birthday/ graduation gifts. This is obviously not fiscally possible for every family, but there are other options. Older kids can use social media to set up GoFundMe pages for causes they care about, or raise money via FaceBook on their birthdays. My 19-year-old recently did a GoFundMe for President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, which is an organization that “focuses on building safe and supportive communities for boys and young men of color where they feel valued and have clear pathways to opportunity.” Within just a very few days, she raised over $ 1000! These sorts of actions are inspirational, and because of social media, “catching.” Her boyfriend used the platform JustGiving and gave away his artwork in exchange for donations to Friends of the Rose Bowl, a British organization trying to help youth from ending up on the streets. The Youth Activism Project which includes information for parents, Middle and High School students might be another good resource. Sadly, Michelle Obama’s Let Girls Learn Initiative is no longer active, but you can find information on other programs targeted towards girls’ education here. 

The gift of a book like Rise Up! is that it introduces our kids to activism through art. Ask them to make their own art in response to the posters and causes that most move them. For your kids who love to write, use these posters as prompts. (For example, let them play with the words of the poster on page 30, “Peace is disarming”). Or for your music lovers, start sharing some of the still awesome protest music you (and your parents and grandparents!) used to listen to and maybe still do: Dylan, Cat Stevens, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, The Byrds, Joni Mitchell, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sly & The Family Stone, Nina Simone, Bob Marley & the Wailers, John Lennon. Or maybe they’ll think you’re much cooler if they hear you listening to Kendrick Lamar, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Janelle Monae, 2Pac, KRS-One, Queen Latifah or Public Enemy (some of these definitely date me!) Just let them know if they sit and really listen to the words, they might be surprised to hear how much of contemporary popular music is actually “protest music.” I’m thinking, for example, of Beyonce’s “Formation” or J. Cole’s “Be Free.” For those of you with children who love musicals, re-listen to the words of “Rent” and of course “Hamilton.” That is also protest music. Remember the children of Birmingham who were part of the Children’s Crusade in 1963 who took to the streets singing: “Ain’t gonna let nobody/ turn me around,/ Turn me around, turn me around./ Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around;/ I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’/ keep on a-talkin’/ Marchin’ up to freedom land!” (listen to this version by Mavis Staples, and this one by The Roots, which includes video from the civil rights era). 

I’m particularly interested in literature and protest. I taught a few sessions on protest writing at the prison where I used to volunteer prior to Covid. It was incredibly empowering for the women to use this medium to write out their despair and to find a voice. Barack Obama said “Poetry matters. Poetry, like all art, gives shape and texture and depth of meaning to our lives” (from Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, edited and compiled by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr). Hopefully the schools are beginning to revise their canons and starting to give kids a taste of Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, etc. For parents interested in current protest poetry by Black authors, I highly recommend Natasha Tretheway, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jericho Brown and Claudia Rankine, but there are so many others. I’ll end with this poem by Kevin Young, because he captures so beautifully that the world is resting in our children’s hands.

Hive

The honey bees’ exile

     is almost complete.

You can carry

them from hive

     to hive, the child thought

& that is what

he tried, walking

     with them thronging

between his pressed palms.

Let him be right.

     Let the gods look away

as always. Let this boy

who carries the entire

     actual, whirring

world in his calm

unwashed hands,

     barely walking, bear

us all there

buzzing, unstung.