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A selection of student activist news from fifty years ago this month, courtesy of the archives of the New York Times.
March 1, 1959: High school students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil begin a strike against increases in private school tuition. By five days later of all the city’s students are participating in the strike. Meanwhile, two hundred students at England’s Cambridge University march in opposition to the appearance of an “ugly” new building on their campus.
March 2, 1959: Crowds in La Paz burn an American flag and stone the US embassy in response to reports that an American diplomat has called for the country of Bolivia to be broken up. One student is shot and killed by police in the demonstrations.
March 3, 1959: Nearly two hundred students are arrested in Bogota, Colombia during the course of mass protests against increases in bus fares.
March 4, 1959: Professors and college administrators attending the National Conference on Higher Education in Chicago pass a resolution calling for the repeal of a law that requires college students to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States before receiving federal financial aid.
March 5, 1959: Police in Goiania, Brazil kill one student and injure 160 more when they break up a demonstration against tuition hikes. Students riot in protest of the violence the following day, setting fire to two buildings.
March 7, 1959: Tens of thousands of Catholic students march in Vienna, Austria to protest plans to stage a communist World Youth Festival in that city in July.
March 14, 1959: A three-day conference of campus newspaper editors, sponsored by the United States National Student Association, opens in New York City. More than one hundred student editors from around the United States are in attendance at the conference, which will become an annual event.
March 16, 1959: Forty Yale undergraduates are arrested and the entire undergraduate student body is placed on probation after two snowball fights, one at the New Haven St. Patrick’s Day parade, turned into riots.
March 18, 1959: The twenty-one black students in Virginia’s Warren County High School enter their second month as the school’s only attendees. The federal government ordered the school opened on an integrated basis in February, and since then none of the school’s one thousand white students have attended class.
March 27, 1959: Marching bands from two black high schools drop out of a ceremony honoring Richmond, Virginia’s minor league baseball team to protest segregated seating at the event.
March 28, 1959: Six hundred students stage a rally against nuclear weapons in New York City’s Bryant Park. Speakers include AJ Muste, Bayard Rustin, and Norman Thomas. Seventy-five of the students march overnight to the rally site from outside the city; some are detained by police en route.
March 30, 1959: Fifteen thousand anti-nuclear protesters march in London, England, demanding that Britain unilaterally give up its atomic weapons and that the United States close its British military bases. The march includes a substantial student contingent.
A big victory for students’ rights: a federal judge has blocked a Pennsylvania prosecutor’s plans to file child pornography charges against three teenage girls who stored suggestive photos of themselves on their cell phones.
Two of the three were wearing opaque bras in the photographs at issue, and the third was topless. None was engaging in sexual activity. The three were among twenty students in Pennsylvania’s Tunkhannock School District who were contacted by the prosecutor after school officials confiscated their cell phones, searched them, and found nude or revealing photos on them.
The prosecutor told the twenty students that they had a choice — they could sign up for an ongoing educational program on “what it means to be a girl in today’s society” and mandatory drug tests, or they could be charged with possession and distribution of child pornography, a felony.
Seventeen of the students signed up for the program. The other three sued. And yesterday a federal judge took their side.
The prosecutor, reached for comment yesterday, refused to say whether he would appeal the judge’s decision.
Here’s another great resource — the National Coalition Against Censorship.
We’ve linked to their blog in our sidebar, but feel free to poke around their main site, too.They’ve got lots of stuff going on, including various projects run through their Youth Free Expression Network.
Bhumika Muchhala, a recent graduate who is now working full-time in USAS’s national office, says anti-sweatshop activism can be “cliquish.” She describes a close-knit, white hippie activist culture that is “not welcoming to people of color.” … Dave Thurston, a black USAS activist who attends CUNY’s Hunter College, agrees that the organization can be inhospitably white and middle-class, semi-indignantly citing the all-vegan food at conferences. “Oh my fucking word,” he sighs, “and twinkling!” (Twinkling is a hand gesture that comes from the Quakers, used to signify assent without disrupting the meeting or repeating what they’ve said; while many find it useful, it can feel alienating to outsiders, and is often cited as a symbol of the odd, cultish behavior of white activists.)
–Liza Featherstone, Students Against Sweatshops, 2001.
Here’s the latest communiqué from The New School In Exile:
No, we haven’t forgotten about April 1st, and neither has the administration. But don’t worry, there is plenty in the works, and the day should not disappoint.
Think carnival. Think circus. Think roving flash mobs. Think zombie Kerrey and Murtha armies. Think beanbag circus freaks and superheroes. Think shutting the school down. Think fun 
We’ll see you on the flip side!
I’ll admit it. They’ve got my attention.
Update: NSIE has put up a countdown clock on their website. Zero hour is just after one o’clock tomorrow afternoon — 1:01:59 pm, to be exact. I have no idea what, if anything, this means.
studentactivism.net 
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