Whatever happened to the Manifesto? I think that young organizers should bring it back or at the very least start creating more lists of demands…

I was invited to attend a meeting a few weeks ago by a group of young organizers who are interested in taking action to address the epidemic of mass incarceration. It is always tricky for older organizers to participate in such meetings. It is hard to know when to speak up and when to stay quiet. I mostly bit my tongue. I wanted to respect their process but when the meeting ended, I did pull a couple of the young organizers aside to offer some suggestions for how to improve their meetings. I asked if they had already developed a list of their wants and demands. They said no. They had spent several meetings already discussing their “shared values” and agreeing to “their process.” I asked if they were surprised that they had lost quite a few members since their launch. They told me that building community among themselves was crucially important. I agreed and said that there is also value though in people gathering to discuss what they want and to plan a strategy & program to achieve it. It’s a balance that many never achieve.

In the 1930s, local youth began to get more involved in protest movements. This was particularly true for Southern youth who gathered in regional assemblies to articulate demands and network. In Opportunity magazine (a publication of the Urban League), Edward Strong reported on one such gathering of black youth that took place in Tennessee in 1938. Below is the position paper of the May 1938 Southern Negro Youth Conference.

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last month, 500 young colored men and women met in the second all-Southern Negro Youth Conference. They came to express their wants and desires — to plan a new design for living — and in the program that they adopted all their hopes and aspirations for a brighter future were reflected.

What is the aim of young Negroes of the South today? What do they want? How do they propose to move ahead? The delegates answered these questions simply and unanimously.

We who are young, and who live in the South, want first of all the right to vote. We want the opportunity to serve on juries, to participate in the primary elections of all parties; to be eligible for appointment to all Federal, state, and municipal positions, and to be acceptable as candidates for public office.

To become voters is, of course, a major task. The barriers that we must overcome include abuse of the poll tax, misuse of literacy tests, the continuance of property qualifications and the misinterpretation of state constitutions by the courts. To surmount these obstacles, we realize, we must acquaint ourselves thoroughly with the laws that govern voting in our respective states, so that we first may vote ourselves, and then assist the masses of Negro people to vote. At the same time, we must organize poll-tax-paying clubs and registration centers in every neighborhood to develop the maximum immediate Negro vote possible under existing conditions, and to broaden the base of that vote at each election.

It is as important, we feel, that we win the right to vote in the party primaries as in the general elections because in most sections of the South victory in the Democratic primary is synonymous with election. This right can only be secured when the U.S. Supreme Court reverses its decision which held the primaries to be private affairs. The recent addition of liberal judges to the bench may bring a reversal if somehow a new primary case can be presented.

A second thing we want is work. Three-quarters of a million of us are now out of school and unemployed. The very existence of the NYA [National Youth Administration, founded in 1935 by the Federal government to provide job training for unemployed youths] and the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps, initiated in 1933 to help unemployed young men find work] is threatened all the time by budget cuts. How to get jobs? How to win economic security? That is one of our major problems.

We feel that the trade-union movement must stand at the heart of any program that we may adopt. That is why we urge further unionization of Negroes and the encouragement of their active participation in bona-fide labor unions, although at the same time we recognize and condemn the openly discriminatory policies of some unions. We want the unions to give us an adequate vocational guidance program and an opportunity for apprenticeship training. We ourselves must work for further opening up of job opportunities for Negro youth in Federal, state and local governments, and in private industry.

We want more opportunity for education. We realize that such a program must contain plans to assist Negro youth financially in their efforts to go to school, and so we hope for the passage of the American Youth Act, which would provide Federal assistance to help the states solve their educational problems.

We want to get married. No one will ever know how many thousands of delayed marriages among Negro youth have been caused by the depression. The result in many cases has been a distressing demoralization and an increase in the prevalence of venereal diseases. Our only real hope for a solution lies in bettered economic conditions, but meanwhile we want courses in marriage and homemaking, and in sex education, made available in our schools.

We want an opportunity to develop our talents. We are eager and anxious to contribute to the Negro’s cultural heritage as artists, musicians, writers and actors. At present our opportunity for expression is severely limited. We realize that most of us do not possess the ability of a Paul Robeson or a Marian Anderson, but we do feel that if allowed the opportunity, we could make original contributions to science, the arts, drama, literature, and music.

We want a religious life. This may seem a bit surprising in view of the prevailing opinion that Negro youth has become increasingly irreligious day by day, but it is none the less true. We cherish the religious heritage of our people and the contribution that has been made through the church to our advancement. The significant feature of our idea of religion is that we insist upon a stricter application of Christian principles to every-day life. We refuse lip-service to the ideal of brotherhood when in practice that ideal is consistently disregarded. We want the church to help us meet concrete life situations.

What must the church do to give us the type of meaningful religious experience we seek? We feel that it must first identify itself with the masses of crucified people of the South. It must become the center of community life, organizing within itself youth and adult groups for Christian social action and promoting fellowship by interdenominational and interracial cooperation.

We want a world of peace. We look with grave concern upon the growth of Fascism and the fascist threat to peace because of the inherent danger of raising the racial myth to a place of major concern in world politics. As a means of obtaining peace we feel that the only workable solution yet proposed is the “quarantine of aggressors” suggested by the President in his speech of last October 5.

These, then, are the aspirations of Southern Negro youth: we want the right to vote, to work, and to complete our education; the opportunity to marry; the chance to express ourselves, the privilege of a satisfactory religious ife, and the assurance of a peaceful world.

In short, we want to live!

Position paper of the Southern Negro Youth Conference, as reported in the Urban League magazine Opportunity, May 1938

What’s striking about this list of demands is how conservative it is in our current historical moment. For example, there is a big emphasis on a desire to marry and form families. In the 1930s however, black youth asserting their desire to marry could be considered radical. It’s interesting to see how much emphasis the youth put on the right and access to voting as well since this is something that is still very much in the news today.There is a big focus in the document on Federal remedies as opposed to state-based ones which is understandable.

The manifesto is surprising for the issues that are omitted. Only a few years removed from the legal lynching of the Scottsboro Boys, there is no mention of the unjust criminal legal system against black youth. I wonder what a group of young black activists and organizers would come up with as their list of demands today…