[Y]oung Writers Project, an independent nonprofit based in Burlington, engages young people to write and use digital media to express themselves with clarity and power, and to gain confidence and skills for school, the workplace and life.
Check out the most recent issue of The Voice, Young Writers Project’s monthly digital magazine. Click here.
Each week, VTDigger features a writing submission – an essay, poem, fiction or nonfiction – accompanied by a photo or illustration from Young Writers Project.
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in newspapers across Vermont, on Vermont Public Radio and in YWP’s monthly digital magazine, The Voice. Since 2006, it has offered young people a place to write, share their photos, art, audio and video, and to explore and connect online at youngwritersproject.org. For more information, please contact Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org.
Speech-writing and oratory proficiency are anxiety-inducing skills for any adult to build, let alone students – yet some rise to the challenge to teach us valuable lessons. This week, Maddie Thibault of Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury presents us their arguments for the necessity of basic civil rights and the courage to stand up for minority groups. From the author themselves, a short word on their own values and the writing of this piece: “I identify as a mix of identities from the LGBT community and old-school feminism, and I use they/them pronouns. I try my best to bring needed change to my school by educating my peers on topics of debate and the history of those topics.”
Civil Rights Speech
By Maddie Thibault
[T]hroughout history, we have been fighting for equal rights – either for our own or someone else’s: women’s rights, African-American rights, LGBT rights… We recognize these movements as we see them happening all around us. We oppose or support them. We rarely stand in the middle.
As we watch these movements barrel down the hill, we watch people trying to spear these movements to stop and destroy them before they reach the point of no return. Their criticizing comments hold us back from taking all the steps we need to. This is why racism and sexism and homophobia and all other hate still exist. We have heard the speeches, the comments, the subtle rebellion. We have seen all that has been done to stop these movements.
I have seen the movements. I have heard the hate. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream, and I have mine. My dream is that people will stop halting these movements and allow us to all gain the human rights we all deserve, and that all those “klans” will just give up and give in to the changing times like the rest of us do.
Malcolm X claimed that we have to fight violence with violence. I believe we can fight violence a different way. We can use the power of our words to show others our views and try to have them understand. We can use the freedom of speech the Bill of Rights promised us to speak our mind without the government stopping us. We can use the voice we have been blessed with to tell the world what we think.
Malala Yousafzai used her voice even when it threatened her life. She almost died because of her bravery to speak out against the injustices women suffered in Pakistan. I’m willing to do the same thing. We can speak our mind in America and use the Constitution to defend us. We need to learn to not abuse this power and that while the government cannot threaten us, normal people can.
People may not like what I have to say, and people may not like what you have to say – but we can say it, and I will speak my mind.
Audre Lorde, who identified herself as a “black, feminist, lesbian, mother and poet,” spoke out in a time when she could have been killed for being who she was. We are lucky to not be stuck in the time she was.
Harvey Milk spoke out as a representative on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and they both helped LGBT people get recognized with the power of their words. Harvey even received daily death threats and was assassinated for being who he was, but he didn’t stop in his lifetime.
Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her seat on a bus and she started a whole boycott because of it. Her boycott lasted 381 days.
All of these activists and these heroes pushed the movements that are around us today. But I have yet to see some movements that I await in anticipation.
Disabilities are a constant joke around us, as we have little education about how they work. We can see someone with a prosthetic and immediately push them down because of it, both physically and mentally.
Mental disabilities are even more of a joke. You don’t even want to know how many times a day I hear someone say they have crippling depression as a joke.
People don’t understand the seriousness of these disabilities and they need to. We need to start teaching people how to work with someone who has a mental disability such as PTSD or who has a physical disability such as missing a hand. People who are disabled get tossed to the side so easily and are easy to lose in the mix of all these movements, and it’s not right. People with disabilities are looked down upon because they function and think differently than others. We need to defend these people with as much fire as we defend others.
The hate groups we hear so much about try to stop these movements. White Supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazis all committed horrible crimes – and are still doing so. They all still hold their rallies and have their supporters, but not nearly as many as we have as we create these movements.
At the moment, our government is full of a bunch of ill-tempered people who don’t want to change with the times. We are the youth and we are the Earth’s future.
They will listen to us, whether they want to or not. We have the power, we have the knowledge and we have the support to get things done. We need to remember to use the human rights that get denied to so many others in different places.
A group of teenagers is heading the gun control movement, and people are learning to listen the hard way.
Think about the “Me Too” movement. Thousands of women are coming forward with the sexual abuse they have suffered at the hands of people of power.
The Black Lives Matter movement is working to spot the violence African-Americans still face in today’s America.
Different as we may be, we can work together to make the change that is needed in the world. We can start in our home and travel to others with our words and inspire people there to do what we have done. We are still working, and we will keep working and maybe we’ll never stop working. But we’ll leave a mark for our progenies to see and understand that we were here.
