FPIF Discussion Paper

Explosion of Youth Activism Around the Iraq War

By Adam Waxman | March 11, 2005

As goes Greensboro, so goes the nation.

Don’t believe me? Greensboro, North Carolina, is a bellwether for the pulse of students across the
country. This Southern city has seven colleges and universities in its metropolitan area. These
schools range in size and political temperament from the small and liberal Guilford and Bennett
Colleges to larger, more conservative institutions such as Elon University and University of North
Carolina - Greensboro (UNCG). As a whole, Greensboro and Guilford County are also a good
microcosm of the country. Mostly rural North Carolina voted for Bush, but more urban Guilford
County and Greensboro narrowly voted for Kerry. Greensboro also attracts lots of out of state stu-
dents—for example, two-thirds of Guilford College’s students are out of state, letting us have our
finger on the pulse of the nation.

And something’s happening here. I’m a sophomore
at Guilford and there’s an energy here that I haven’t
seen in nearly two years of organizing on this cam-
pus. Since late January, our campus has been con-
sumed by organizing for a large demonstration
against the Iraq War in nearby Fayetteville (home of
Ft. Bragg) on March 19. In our first two days of
tabling, we signed up 80 students to attend the
march. Students are engaged and determined to take
action on Iraq.
For example, we are reaching more and more stu-
dents who are natives of the South. Some of the main
leaders of our organizing committee for the March
19th action were born and raised in Greensboro. A
specific person who signed up to go to the march
recently stands out in my mind—this guy, an adult
education student at Guilford, is a native of North
Carolina who is a semi-retired 11-year veteran of the
United States Marine Corps and drives racecars for a
living. You don’t get much more “red state” than that.

This specific demonstration that we’re working
toward is unusual as well. It will bring together mili-
tary families, veterans, and their supporters for a rally
calling for the United States to bring the troops
home and end the war. That’s unusual because most
in our activist community don’t identify with military
families and veterans. There are reasons for this. First,
Guilford is a Quaker school, and many in our activist
community are pacifists. Cultural and class conflicts
have often made our organizing more fragmented
than it should be. Yet, a higher number than usual of
our students (compared to other actions) are not only
committed to going to the demonstration, but are
actively organizing on our campus as well.
His and other veterans’ involvement in the move-
ment reflect a main theme of the demonstration that
is set for March 19th. The peace movement is gener-
ally seeing more people who are directly affected by
the war, namely veterans and their families, speaking
out.
Anecdotes from Guilford are of course not the best
determinant of the level of student activism in
Greensboro. After all, Guilford is a Quaker school
with a strong history of progressive political action.
Yet, something is happening across Greensboro as
well. Students are organizing on all seven campuses
for this demonstration. For the first time we are
actively coordinating our work by forming the

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Greensboro Student Action Coalition (GSAC). The
coalition’s first big event, a teach-in connecting stu-
dent activism to the peace work of military veterans,
drew over 50 student activists from across
Greensboro to network and strategize around ending
the war. This event also attracted widespread atten-
tion from local media, which doesn’t often happen at
progressive events in Greensboro.
“It’s been really incredible,” notes Liz Nemitz, a
senior at Guilford who has been involved in the
coalition since its inception. “We’re doing work with
kids at University North Carolina-Greensboro,
Bennett, and Agriculture and Technical University in
Greensboro that we never had worked with before,
and it’s brought a whole new perspective to our
organizing—we see ourselves as a college town rather
than in individual bubbles.”
I’ve seen what Liz says is true—for the first time,
I’ve found myself leaving Guilford’s campus to go do
outreach on other, more conservative campuses where
organizers are needed. It’s brought me a whole new
level of respect for activists on those campuses,
activists who work hard under difficult circum-
stances.
Some of the work in Greensboro has come about as
a result of local organizing by the Beloved
Community Center, a group that works on economic
and racial justice issues. Trends nationally, however,
point to increasing concern and student activism
around Iraq. For example, many thousands of young
people turned out to protest President George W.
Bush’s inauguration on January 20. Thousands more
participated in a massive nationwide student strike
that occurred in a diverse group of schools including
Seattle Central Community College, Paideia High
School in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boulder High in
Colorado.
I may be only 20 years old, but I’ve been an organ-
izer since 2002. Speaking from my experience in
organizing for the January 20 demonstration, I found
that folks who had not been active politically before
were motivated to demonstrate. Polling also suggests
that youth are fearful of a draft (when the question is
asked, about 80% of young people are against rein-
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stating conscription) and turning against the war in
droves.
Student activism around Iraq is not new. Students
played a key role in the peace movement prior to the
invasion of Iraq, with the National Youth and
Student Peace Coalition organizing a major student
strike on March 5 of 2003. After the invasion, how-
ever, student activism seemed to drop off a bit.
Organizations like the National Youth and Student
Peace Coalition that had worked on the student
strike got less press attention that they did before the
war, even when compared to the attention that was
given to other peace groups like United for Peace and
Justice during the same period after the invasion.
According to an article by Richard Moreno for Z
Magazine, most of the schools that had large walk-
outs on January 20 of this year were not the same
schools that had seen large protests on March 5,
2003. Moreno goes on to correctly note that one fact
this trend shows is that much of the work that hap-
pened before the war did not sustain itself, or resur-
face until this year.
So why now are more students getting involved in
Iraq-related issues? There are several reasons why stu-
dent activism is bubbling up now. Many of the rea-
sons are pretty obvious: for example, it has become
clear that the Bush administration lacks an exit strate-
gy in Iraq, and young people fear a draft. However, I
believe there is one major reason that youth have
turned to acting against the war that has been over-
looked by many commentators: the 2004 election.
America’s youth today are consummate volunteers,
though less civically active in terms of voting when
long-term trends are examined going back to the
1970s. This is especially true of college students.
Surveys have shown that 60% of young people do
over 3.5 hours of service a week, and that number is
increasing due to outreach programs by colleges that
provide support for college student volunteers. Many
youth activists work in areas such as hunger, home-
lessness, fair housing, and justice for prisoners.
The 2004 election helped institutionalize the idea
of political activism as a part of service. Nonprofits
such as National Voice and the League of Young
Voters worked directly with community groups to
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help register and turn out youth. Youth-focused
media such as Comedy Central and MTV decided
that this was the election for youth empowerment
and turnout, and spent a lot of resources emphasizing
civic responsibility through Public Service
Announcements featuring youth celebrities such as
Ashton Kutcher and Seth Green. Rock the Vote, a
nonpartisan arm of MTV, worked to register voters as
never before, registering over a million youth voters
in 2004. Also, the influence of Jon Stewart’s increas-
ingly political The Daily Show on youth culture can-
not be overstated.
As a result of all of the work of these various non-
profits and media organizations about 45% of young
people (age 18-24) voted in 2004. That was the
demographic’s highest voting rate since 1992, accord-
ing to exit polls and analysis by CIRCLE, a research
center on youth and civic engagement housed at the
University of Maryland School of Public Policy.
http://www.civicyouth.org/
We also volunteered on more campaigns, everything
from dogcatcher to president. Overwhelmingly, we
supported progressive candidates—especially the can-
didacies of Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, who
opposed the Iraq War. Exit polling showed that
young people cited foreign policy and Iraq as perhaps
their foremost reason for getting involved. Yet, of
course, progressive young people lost in 2004.
Neither Dean nor Kucinich won the Democratic
nomination, and Kerry went down to defeat.
Unlike many activists on the left, however, youth
did not despair in the dark winter of December
2004. There was no talk of running to Canada, or
giving up on politics altogether. Instead, we kept up
the energy that had grown in 2004 and looked for
other places to put it.
Many went back to their work in soup kitchens and
homeless shelters, but with a new sense that advocacy
and politics matter. John Wilson Irwin, a Greensboro
student who hails from a low-income neighborhood
in Memphis who now is an activist with the
Greensboro Housing Coalition, notes: “I see connec-
tions between the fact that people in Greensboro
don’t have adequate housing and the fact that we’re
spending billions of dollars on a pointless war.”
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As someone who has worked as both a peace activist
and on numerous political campaigns, I have recog-
nized several ways in which various activist move-
ments can tap into student energy. The most impor-
tant is this: give young people real responsibility in
the movement and listen to their ideas. Political cam-
paigns tend to take their bright, energetic young vol-
unteers and stick them in a windowless room to stuff
envelops. They’re used solely for grunt work—knock-
ing on doors, manning phone banks, etc. Every now
and then that can be fun, and it’s obviously necessary
work, but if I’m going to make a hundred phone
calls, I’d like at least to have a voice in what it is I’m
saying.
Surveying some of the peace groups, it appears to
me that the movement against the Iraq War War is
doing a good job in this respect. For example, United
for Peace and Justice, the large U.S. peace movement
coalition, does a good job of integrating youth voices
into its work and leadership positions. One in eight
members of the coalition’s 40-member steering com-
mittee represent youth-oriented groups such as the
National Youth and Student Peace Coalition and
Student United for a Responsible Global
Environment.
In contrast, of the over 400 members of the
Democratic National Committee (the official, elected
leadership of the Democratic Party), only one in 20
are under 30. None of the DNC’s nine elected lead-
ers serve as a formal youth liaison, despite the fact
that this was one of the only age demographics to
decisively break for Kerry.
The DNC does have a large youth-affiliate organi-
zation in College Democrats of America. I have
worked with both the peace movement and on
Democratic electoral campaigns. Based on that per-
sonal experience, I can say that I have found peace
activists much more willing to respect my ideas and
use my energy to its fullest potential, whereas when
working on Democratic political campaigns I was
only used for grunt work. The only exception in my
experience was the Howard Dean campaign, which
did a great job giving young people a real voice in the
organization and the organizing.
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 The 2004 elections were, in many obvious ways, a
defeat for the left. But pessimistic analysts who see it
as a total defeat are ignoring cultural shifts and long-
term trends that are poised to benefit the peace
movement and the wider progressive political com-
munity. In particular, youth activism around the elec-
tion prepared a shift in youth culture that will greatly
benefit the peace movement in 2005 and beyond.

Adam Waxman is a sophomore at Guilford College

studying International Political Economy and
Quaker Theology. He interned for Foreign Policy In
Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in the sum-
mer of 2004 and is an FPIF contributor (online at
www.fpif.org). Last fall he was elected president of
the Guilford College Young Democrats. Currently he
is working with the North Carolina Peace and
Justice Coalition and the March 19th Mobilization
Committee at Guilford. A collection of his published
writings can be found at www.domne.blogspot.com.

Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the International Relations Center (IRC, formerly Interhemispheric Resource Center,
online at www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). ©2005. All rights reserved.

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Recommended citation:
Adam Waxman, “Explosion of Youth Activism Around the Iraq War,” (Silver City, NM & Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, March 11, 2005).

Web location:
http://www.fpif.org/papers/0503students.html

Production Information:
Writer: Adam Waxman
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco, IPS
Layout: Tonya Cannariato, IRC

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