When 17-year-old Myra Richardson first heard the news of Alton Sterling’s shooting, the first place she turned was social media.
She and her friends snapped and tweeted back and forth in the rapid, fluent way that only teenagers can. What was happening? What were people saying about it? What was going to happen next?
Alongside two Baton Rouge High classmates and fellow Baton Rouge Youth Coalition members, Jeanette Jackson (15) and Raheejah Flow- ers (15), Myra then jumped into a group iMessage chat with “like 90” other teenagers, and a plan came together at 3 a.m.
That plan: a massive, peaceful, youth-led protest in the streets of downtown to call for an end to po- lice brutality. They call themselves the Wave.
“The world we live in today in America operates on two different planes. One is the constitutional one where all the laws are written out and everyone is equal. And then there’s reality,” Myra says. “The constitutional plane is only afforded to a small group of people, and I just happen to not be one of them, and neither are other girls or black young men. So how do we mesh those to make them equal? We start with movements like this, the Wave.”
The Wave aims to mobilize youth to stand up against systemic oppression of the black community with peaceful protests, and the group stresses the importance of inclusiveness. Myra asks a crucial question of anyone wanting to be a proponent of the cause: “What are you adding to the collective impact?” As long as you’re with them, nothing else matters.
Myra, Jeanette and Raheejah linked arms the Sunday following Sterling’s shooting in bright yellow T-shirts for maximum visibility and marched to the State Capitol with thousands of peaceful protesters. Though Myra’s fellow teenagers comprised much of the crowd, hun- dreds of adults fell in with Wave, looking to the youth to lead.
On the steps of the Capitol, Myra rallied the crowd with an emotional speech that drew shouts of assent from the youngest to the oldest activists in the crowd.
“The youth are more powerful at organizing and galvanizing because we personally are more optimistic about humanity,” Myra says. “We haven’t seen all these atrocities that some of these adults have, so we’re still ready to do this work.”
In the midst of rising tensions all over the country, the young organizers behind the Wave push for peaceful demonstrations to show that black youth is “above brute force.”
“When we first started, we said we wanted it to be peaceful intentionally. Maybe we were playing on respectability politics, but we also did it with the purpose of, hey, if we can do this peacefully, we’re proving to the secret, latent white supremacists out there somewhere that young black people can join in coalition together. … We can talk about new Jim Crow laws or institutional racism … and we can do all these powerful things. I mean, some people just don’t think it’s possible.”
The Wave organizers have already begun meeting with lawyers and leaders in the community and plan to continue events and demonstrations throughout the coming months to push for progress in civil rights in Baton Rouge. With young people like Myra, Jeanette and Raheejah peacefully leading the charge, the future seems a little brighter.
