Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor
Youth rights |
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Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor was an organization based in
History
The organization was founded by several Ann Arbor teenagers in December 1970, when the first draft of the Youth Liberation platform was written.
In the Spring of 1971, its members successfully persuaded the Ann Arbor, Mich. city council to drop its curfew laws. During the 1971–1972 school year, student unions were started in many schools in the Ann Arbor area.[2]
In 1972, Youth Liberation's Sonia Yaco, a fifteen-year-old student, ran for the Ann Arbor School Board as a member of the local Human Rights Party. Regulations stipulated that only adults could run for school board, but Yaco's demands for a student voice in school governance earned her 1,300 votes as a write-in candidate, or eight percent of the total. Her campaign indirectly influenced the establishment of the experimental, alternative Community High School in Ann Arbor later that year.
Publications
The group's publications arm, the Youth Liberation Press, began in 1969 as a separate entity known as CHIPS (Chicago area High school Independent Press Service), the acronym later changed to stand for
- How to Start a High School Underground Newspaper (Chicago, IL: High School Independent Press, 1969).
- Youth Liberation: News, Politics and Survival Information (Washington, NJ: Times Change Press, 1972).
- High School Women's Liberation (Ann Arbor, MI: Youth Liberation Press, 1976).
- A Youth Liberation Pamphlet (Ann Arbor, MI: Youth Liberation Press, 1977).
- Growing Up Gay (Boston, MA: Carrier Pigeon, 1978).
- Keith Hefner, Children's Rights Handbook (Ann Arbor, MI: Youth Liberation Press, 1979).
Currently all pamphlets and issues of FPS published from 1970 through 1978 are available on the website www.youthliberation.com owned by Chuck Ream, one of the earliest contributors to the publication.
Manifesto
The group's manifesto was reprinted in The Children's Rights Movement: Overcoming the Oppression of Young People, edited by Beatrice and Ronald Gross (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977), pp. 329–33.
YOUTH LIBERATION PROGRAM LIST OF WANTS -- "We must liberate ourselves from the death trip of corporate America."
- 1. We want the power to determine our own destiny.
- 2. We want the immediate end of adult chauvinism.
- 3. We want full civil and human rights.
- 4. We want the right to form our education according to our needs.
- 5. We want the freedom to form into communal families.
- 6. We want the end of male chauvinism and sexism.
- 7. We want the opportunity to create an authentic culture with institutions of our own making.
- 8. We want sexual self-determination. We believe all people must have the unhindered right to be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or transsexual.
- 9. We want the end of class antagonism among young people.
- 10. We want the end of racism and colonialism in the United States and the world.
- 11. We want freedom for all unjustly imprisoned people.
- 12. We want the right to be economically independent of adults.
- 13. We want the right to live in harmony with nature.
- 14. We want to rehumanize existence.
- 15. We want to develop communication and solidarity with the young people of the world in our common struggle for freedom and peace.
See also
- History of Youth Rights in the United States
- Youth-led media
- Keith Hefner
- Sonia Yaco
References
- ^ Youth Liberation: News, Politics, and Survival Information Put Together by Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor. Washington, N.J., Times Change Press, 1972.
- ^ Youth Liberation, p. 8-9.
- ^ Youth Liberation, p. 9.
- ^ FPS is rumored to stand for "Fuck Public School," however its publishers claim that it does not officially stand for anything. Youth Liberation, p. 61.
- ^ FPS, February 7, 1972, issue.
External links
- Mike Mosher, "Youth Liberation of Ann Arbor: Young, Gifted and Media-Savvy" Archived 2011-09-27 at the Wayback Machine, Bad Subjects, no. 47 (January 2000).
- Keith Hefner, "The Evolution of Youth Empowerment at a Youth Newspaper", originally published in Social-Policy, vol. 19, no. 1 (Summer 1988), pp. 21–24.