In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, acclaimed civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill urged advocates for justice and equity in an essay to sustain our bonds across identities of race, sex and religion. To challenge “the power of racism and its grip on this country,” she said, we must resist attempts to divide and isolate us from one another. I embrace Ifill’s advice, and I believe we must include age in the list of intergroup connections that enable us to combat racism. Intergenerational collaboration, in addition to connection across race, sex and religion, can help us see the world in new ways.
Speaking and listening across generations will deepen our shared commitment to antiracism and make room for new and innovative strategies. When we recognize that an array of perspectives and experiences point us in the same direction, we open doors allowing us to move together in spite of our differing standpoints. I offer two examples.
Speaking and listening across generations will deepen our shared commitment to antiracism and make room for new and innovative strategies.
Intergenerational collaboration for racial justice in the 1960s
Ella Baker met student leaders of the Southern sit-in movement in April 1960. She knew from contacts in local communities that young student organizers’ actions were making an impact on segregation. Eager to support them, Baker invited these students to share their experiences with each other at an Easter weekend conference.
Baker worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of Black, male ministers. She was the only non-minister in SCLC, 20 years older than most members, and the sole female. She understood what it felt like to stand on the outside of justice work, not being allowed into the inner circle because you did not mirror those who stood there. She also recognized the need for grassroots organizing. So she invited young leaders to a conference, handling the planning and logistics and securing SCLC funding for the meeting.
Baker saw that the young students brought passion and experience in frontline direct action to energize the movement. They were unburdened by jobs, children and reputations, so they could risk going to jail. They operated by consensus which meant that all participated in plans and decisions. If some of them were in jail, others could continue the work.
In contrast, the ministers of SCLC had a great deal at stake: families to worry about, reputations to protect and funds to raise. Baker was attuned to the traditional power dynamics. She structured the conference so that the youth had space and time to develop their own organization. Baker facilitated discussions among sit-in participants that were closed to more established attendees and to the press.
The conference’s major outcome was the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student-centered autonomous organization with an invited panel of older advisors that included Baker, Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Zinn. Through this work, Baker bridged generational and ideological differences between the sit-in activists and the ministers of SCLC. She navigated complex dynamics that often excluded young people as decision-makers and found a way to include and empower them, which she knew would strengthen the movement for civil rights.
Intergenerational collaboration for racial justice in the 1990s
Like Baker, Susie Oppenheim, an educator at Southside Family School in Minneapolis, believed children learn best when they explore material that supports their own agency and control. So, she developed a middle school history curriculum anchored in the Civil Rights Movement. I joined Oppenheim and her students as a participant-observer, documenting our adventures of learning, teaching and community conversations.
Oppenheim’s civil rights history lessons consistently incorporated the experiences of children and youth. Teachings about the Montgomery Bus Boycott featured Claudette Colvin (age 15) and Mary Louise Smith (age 18) as well as Rosa Parks. Oppenheim’s students read an account of Bloody Sunday by Sheyann Webb and Rachel West, who were 8- and 9-years-old when they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with people the age of their parents and grandparents. Oppenheim introduced the Birmingham Children’s March with testimonies of young participants themselves, included in Ellen Levine’s Freedom’s Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories. As Levine wrote:
[A]mong the most powerful models for young people today are their heroic counterparts of yesterday—not heroes on pedestals, adult and remote, but kids like themselves who believed that their world could change for the better and undertook the challenge to make the changes.
Every three years between 1993 and 2017, Oppenheim and her 11–14-year-old students traveled by bus to meet people whose stories they knew from Freedom’s Children. Among them were Barbara Howard and Arlam Carr in Montgomery. Myrna Carter Jackson in Birmingham and Sheyann Webb in Selma, Alabama. The students’ knowledge of civil rights history led to questions that sometimes surprised movement veterans and led to discussions that convinced elders their decades-old actions still matter. Oppenheim encouraged and empowered many young people to develop their own vision of what it takes to build bonds to fight against racism and oppression.
Ella Baker and Susie Oppenheim invited young people into safe spaces, recognized the legitimacy of their concerns and facilitated their empowerment. Both honored young people’s critical questions and encouraged democratic participation. Neither aspired to control young people, instead mentoring them into what they wanted to know. Baker and Oppenheim respected young people as valuable members of the present, not just of the future. Both recognized that each generation experiences history from a particular standpoint, each standpoint holding insight and value.
Collaborating across age groups and bringing youth into the movement to end racism will require wisdom and experience of the sort that Ella Baker and Susie Oppenheim modeled.
Collaborating across age groups and bringing youth into the movement to end racism will require wisdom and experience of the sort that Ella Baker and Susie Oppenheim modeled. This will play out differently among communities, congregations, schools and neighborhoods.
I suggest starting with three questions:
- Where do we see intergenerational connections emerging, or already manifesting?
- Who are the generational bridge-builders in our community, congregation, neighborhood? Who are our Ella Bakers and Susie Oppenheims?
- How might we reframe conflicting standpoints and power differences as resources?
Interested in more content like this article on intergenerational collaboration? Sign up for our weekly emails.
