What was the role of youth during the Civil Rights Movement?

During the Civil Rights movement, some young people felt the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was focusing too much on litigation rather than grassroots activism. The NAACP had spearheaded a campaign to end segregation in schools, leading the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. SNCC, or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was one of the most visible and important groups of young people in the Civil Rights movement. SNCC was born at a meeting that Ella Baker, a staff member and later director of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) held in 1960 for student activists.

SNCC went on to organize many campaigns in the Civil Rights movement, including the sit-in movements in Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee. These sit-ins, organized by leader Diane Nash (who was trained in non-violence by James Lawson at Fisk University in Nashville), John Lewis, and others, also helped give rise to SNCC. Diane Nash is a particularly compelling example of a student who was able to spearhead or help several campaigns in the movement, including the 1963 campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, and the 1965 marches for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. SNCC also played a major role in the 1963 March on Washington (where Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech) and the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama, also organized by SNCC, later grew into the Black Panther Party. 

Children also played an important role in the 1963 campaign, organized by the SCLC, to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most segregated cities in the United States at that time. During the "Children's Crusade" in May of 1963, thousands of children, some as young as eight years old, were recruited to protest segregation. The leaders of the movement felt as though children would be better able to protest than their parents, who had to work. Eugene "Bull" Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, instructed the police to fire water hoses at the children, and images of the children being pummeled with water and herded into police vans shocked the world and helped convince the nation that the federal government had to enforce an end to segregation. In the fall of 1963, four African-American girls were killed when the KKK set off a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. These girls became martyrs of the cause and also helped advance the Civil Rights movement.