YOUNG PEOPLE NEED TO LEAD A BOYCOTT OF THE OIL COMPANIES
Photo credit: "Global Climate Strike-Birmingham" by Nick:Wood is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The most recent spike in gas and oil prices is the result of the OPEC nations and fossil fuel industry’s effort to return to pre-pandemic profit levels. While many people are driving less and no longer commuting to work, the oil companies are using their control over gas supplies, and domestic and international markets, to recoup losses that occurred in 2020. Unfortunately, elected officials have allowed the industry to control prices and manipulate supplies irrespective of its impact on local and national economies or consumers’ budgets. But consumers in general, and young people in particular, who are being impacted negatively should take a lesson from history and organize boycotts and strikes targeting oil companies engaged in price gouging and continuing to endanger our physical environment.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, when legislation guaranteed workers the right to organize unions to bargain with employers for wages and working conditions, it was the willingness of workers to engage in strikes and boycotts that brought about significant advancements and increased economic equality. Economist Robert Putnam and others found that it was the bottom-up organizing and union strikes by the workers themselves that contributed to “The Great Convergence” between 1915 and 1965, when gaps in wealth and incomes between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent were the smallest. Similarly, with regard to the movement for racial equality, it was the bottom-up organizing, boycotts, and other nonviolent direct-action protests that resulted in an end of legal segregation and racial discrimination. During the Civil Rights Era, while the lawsuits and court challenges were important, it was the willingness of thousands of children and adults to participate in boycotts and protests in Montgomery, Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and numerous other parts of the country that ushered in social and political change.
Children and teenagers participated in numerous boycotts aimed at gaining equal access to public accommodations and non-discrimination in employment and education. Joseph Lacey was 13-years-old when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955 and recalled that during that year-long campaign, “I walked to school.” “Everybody stuck together on the boycott,” and many people were arrested “on trumped-up charges” because “they were picking people up.” After the victory in the courts in December 1956, Lacey no longer sat in the back of the bus, “I’d sit right behind the driver. It gave me great pleasure.”
After teenagers launched the Greensboro sit-ins in February 1960, hundreds of similar protests took place. But there was little change initially in racial practices in many parts of the South, so civil-rights activists called for an “Easter Boycott” in April 1960 of all department stores practicing racial discrimination. Children and teenagers who usually looked forward to the purchase of a new Easter outfit for church or school were asked to make the sacrifice. NAACP leader Medgar Evers and others asked young people that year to wear “Old Clothes and New Dignity.”
Before and after 1960, children and teenagers launched their own boycotts of public schools where it was almost impossible to learn because of the dilapidated and run-down conditions and absence of educational resources. In Lumberton, North Carolina, in October 1946, the members of the NAACP youth council organized the boycott of all-black Redstone School, which had no running water and was considered “a firetrap” due to poor electrical wiring, and the all-black Thompson Institute, which was in even worst condition, was “not worthy for human beings.” The students marched on the town carrying signs declaring: “How Can I Learn When I’m Cold?” And when there was no response, they organized a boycott on October 7, 1946. Lillian Bullock, 16-years-old at the time, recalled, “There were a lot of people—black people—that said we shouldn’t have done that, but what are you going to do?” The boycott lasted over a week, and the students returned only after school officials agreed to make improvements.
The largest civil-rights demonstration in the United States was not the August 1963 “March on Washington,” but the school boycott in New York City on February 4, 1964, in which over 370,000 black, white, and Puerto Rican students participated, and thousands attended “freedom schools.” Hundreds of thousands of students participated in school boycotts for “quality integrated education” in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and other cities in the early 1960s. In New York City, when a Times reporter asked a young white student why she was boycotting her school that day, her reply reflected what thousands of other young activists believed, “It’s up to the young people to show the adults how we feel.”
Last year thousands of young people mobilized and demonstrated how they felt about the police murder of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and too many others. Young people in 2021 are facing a pandemic and an oil industry seeking to make huge profits at a time of high unemployment and increased financial insecurity for many families. Teenagers and young people need to organize boycotts targeting specific companies in the oil industry to demonstrate how they feel about the rising gas prices and the threat that pollution from fossil fuels presents to their future.
V. P. Franklin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and Education at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement (Beacon Press, 2021).