“All We Had Was Each Other”: Youth-Led Community Organizing
Curriculum unit. By Vy Tran and José Garcia. With Steven Tatum. This unit engages young peoples’s critical reading and analysis skills through a survey of Connecticut’s past, present, and future of youth-led community organizing.
Through rhetorical analysis of youth organizing manifestos, demands, and platforms, students will be introduced to the varied ways young people have come together to lead change.
Educators will be provided with Common Core English Language Arts Standards, accountability guidelines, unit vocabulary, essential questions, three lesson plans, a final assignment, recommended resources and a bibliography.
This unit was originally designed for 9th-grade ELA classrooms, but can be adapted for other high school grade levels and subjects.
Introduction
The curriculum begins with a terminology and narrative overview that introduces the varied ways young people have come together to lead change. Through close readings of “informational texts” representing Connecticut youth organizing since the 1960s, students assess the strength of arguments and their supporting claims as well as evaluate audience, purpose, rhetorical strategies, and biases. In doing so, they particularly trouble the genre of news journalism as a purely “objective” source of knowledge. As the literature on youth organizing demonstrates, these “factual” sites often advance dominant ways of seeing, knowing, and being. In turn, they serve to legitimate an unjust status quo.
Unit Essential Questions
What are counternarratives? How can counternarratives help challenge power?What do counternarratives teach us about resistance?
What makes an argument strong? What literary strategies strengthen journalistic writing? How do journalists structure their writing? What makes that structure effective? What might be left out in news journalism? Can those gaps be filled? If so, how?
How clear are the boundaries between objective and subjective writing? What do counternarratives have to teach us about the limits of objectivity? Does objectivity exist?
What is compelling about the demands from and platforms of youth organizers today? What does an understanding of racist reporting in the ‘news’ teach us about the strength and energies of young people of color in particular? How can young people make their own counternarratives?
Alternative Assessments
The unit concludes with an assessment that can take one of two forms— either (1) creating a manifesto or (2) redesigning a newspaper (article). The first option invites students to draw on the unit’s readings and collaboratively imagine alternatives to something in their community and/or school they believe should change. The second will ask students to complete a “counternarrative” of their own, where they will select a news spread/article and reimagine its content, placement, naming, and images.
Unit Inspiration
For four days’ time in August of 1967, Black and Puerto Rican New Haveners took to the streets after a white restaurant owner in the city shot a Puerto Rican man. The demonstrations, catalyzed by the shooting, came against the backdrop of inordinate discrimination, policing, disinvestment, and surveillance of minoritized communities. Protestors were met with uncompromising local police and federal troops, who harmed and damaged peoples and properties across New Haven. To make matters worse, the City’s Mayor implemented a draconian curfew that targeted resistors and culminated in over 500 arrests.
Day-to-day reporting on the ‘riots’ painted the city’s communities of color not only as violent but culpable— as one headline on the third day of the protest observed, “It was Plain Hoodlumism, Not Protest.” Little attention in the reporting, if any, was paid to the longstanding, state-sanctioned violence waged against people of color across New Haven, Connecticut, the US, and the globe.
New Haven Register, 1967
50 years later, the publication responsible for most reporting on the 1967 uprisings released an anniversary issue that sought to reflect upon and deepen coverage of that year’s events. Particularly, it highlighted the role that community organizations served before, during, and after the protests. Interviewees, many of whom were teenagers during the protests, reflected on how their membership in coalitions that regularly led political education provided an infrastructure and community with which to navigate adversity, like the 1967 police invasion, and to self-determine free futures.
Behind these coalitions were the energies and leadership of young people. Such was the case in 1967 New Haven, where twelve year old resident of the Elm City’s Newhallville neighborhood, Sally Brown, radically understood her responsibility to her neighbors from insight gained as a member of the Black Panther Party.
“We didn’t know what was going on, especially with all of the outside forces coming into the community...when the riots happened, all we had was each other,” Brown shared. As much as the news journalism archive and its afterlives undermine radical organizing in the United States, those gaps do not reflect the absence of action. Indeed, listening to these silences reveals how oppressed peoples accompanied one another in ways illegible to the dominant order. This accompaniment— in the face of state-sanctioned violence— is exactly what Brown’s comment captures. All we have is each other.
Our collective continuance depends on how we transform the harmful habits of coexistence we inherit under racial capitalism and, in its place, practice sustainable ways to care for one another. It is this unit’s intention to facilitate critical conversation and dialogue— between informational texts and their readers— that help propel us toward that horizon.