College is a time when young adults can strike out on their own, and sometimes, students don't just find their calling but their causes, too. When …
Student Protests That Got The Entire World's Attention
College is a time when young adults can strike out on their own, and sometimes, students don't just find their calling but their causes, too. When they get together to find their voices, it can shake the world: Interestingly, University of Minnesota professor and historian David M. Perry and Virginia Tech professor Matthew Gabriele say (via CNN) that student protests actually created the modern university.
Tempers have run high ever since ongoing hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas broke out into open conflict on October 7, 2023. Citing a recent study by Morning Consult, Time magazine states that global opinion about Israel's response to Hamas' attacks has all but universally nosedived. South Africa has even filed a case against Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for "genocidal acts" conducted against Palestinians living in the Hamas hotbed of Gaza, as Time outlines.
Students taking to a public square to mourn an admired politician in China was not uncommon, but this time the students never left. They continued to protest at Tiananmen Square from the time of Hu Yaobang's death until May 13, when they declared a hunger strike and set up camp. The Communist Party was divided by those who wanted to listen to the students and those who saw them as a menace. According The Washington Post article from 1989, "More than 1,000 university students began a hunger strike in the center of Beijing tonight, pressing their demand for a dialogue with the government less than 48 hours before Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's arrival here." The fact that it intersected with Gorbachev's visit gave the protests national attention.
The different ways that a country responds to its student protests says a great deal more about the country's leadership than it says about the students, and unfortunately, many student protests have ended in avoidable tragedy. But as long as there are students, they will continue to protest for what they believe in. Here are some of the strangest student protests in history.
The 1950s were an era of transformative pushbacks on segregation laws. In 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat to a white man on the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and was arrested for her defiance. This sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and a national conversation about whether the Southern states of America were truly ready for integration. Enter nine black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, who volunteered to integrate Central High School in 1957, which, up until that point, had an all-white student population.
Discover the untold truth behind historical political moments as well as today's politicians.