Famous student protests from around the world

Photo illustration by Stacker // Getty Images Last May’s proliferating pro-Palestine student protests match a storied history of student activism in the United States and around the world. Colleges across the U.S. are preparing for the students’ momentum, interrupted by the end of the spring semester, to pick up in the coming weeks as students return to campus for the new academic year. Many student activists, both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, have used the summer to strategize. From pre-Civil Rights demonstrations in the early 20th century to anti-gun marches last year, young people have gone to great lengths over time to make their voices heard–sometimes risking their lives doing so. Stacker explored famous student protests in modern history dating back to the turn of the 20th century. Student protesters have come from all races, classes, genders, and nationalities. Their ages have ranged from middle schoolers to graduate students, and protests have occurred across institutions. The impact of student protest movements has echoed throughout history. The White Rose resistance group in Nazi Germany, founded by medical students, inspired generations of nonviolent protestors, while the 1987 June Democratic Struggle in South Korea dissolved the military regime there and established modern-day Korean democracy. In the United States, student activists have advocated for a wide range of issues, including women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, racial equality, peace, reproductive freedom, affordable education, debt-free tuition, police accountability, gun control, and more. Some of the biggest revolutions across the world have originated with students. The responses from authorities have varied. In some cases, the young people have been allowed to protest freely, while others have been silenced and suppressed, sometimes violently. History is full of examples of police and military forces breaking up peaceful protests employing batons, tear gas, beatings, and even gunfire–as it is full of instances where protests turned into riots or prevented fellow students from attending class or other school activities. Keep reading to learn more about famous student protests worldwide. You may also like: The Black church creating a new village on Chicago’s South Side 1901: Wrze nia School Strike in Poland gkordus // Shutterstock When German school officials announced in March 1901 that religion classes at the Catholic People’s School in Wrze nia, an annexed section of Poland, would be held in Germany, more than 100 students protested. They rejected the German textbooks, suffering detention and beatings as a result. On May 20, 1901, officials dispersed a large crowd of students and parents in front of the school and jailed many of the adults. Over the next three years, trials unfolded while young people continued striking–at least two of whom were beaten to death. 1924-25: Fisk University protests Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images American students at the historically black Fisk University in the mid-1920s launched a massive protest against the school’s white president, Fayette McKenzie, who’d taken extreme measures–including shutting down the student newspaper and banning most extracurricular activities–to court donors. When alumnus W.E.B. Du Bois, then a rising star with a daughter at the college, visited the campus in 1924, he called out the president in a speech from the chapel: “Men and women of Black America: Let no decent Negro send his child to Fisk until Fayette McKenzie goes.” The speech prompted months of student strikes, marking some of the first Black student-led activism and serving as a precursor to the Civil Rights movement. 1930s: UCLA anti-establishment protests Dick Whittington Studio/Corbis via Getty Images More than 3,000 students at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1934 took to the campus’ Royce Quad to protest after five students were suspended amid the West Coast “red scare” for alleged communist affiliations. They threw a police officer in the bushes, but police made no arrests. Meanwhile, with another war on the horizon, students at their sister school, UC Berkeley, launched protests of their own.  Royce Quad is the exact location where violence erupted between pro-Palestinian protestors and counterprotesters on May 1. 1942: White Rose Society resistance in Germany ullstein bild via Getty Images As fascism was unfolding in Nazi Germany, a group of students at the University of Munich got together in the summer of 1942 to form a resistance movement that came to be known as the White Rose Society. The group anonymously handed out fliers admonishing Adolf Hitler’s regime and decrying the persecution of the Jews. In less than a year, however, the Gestapo had arrested most of the organization’s key members and put the young activists on trial in kangaroo courts, sentencing many to death. 1956: Hungarian Revolution student marches REPORTERS ASSOCIES/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 may never have unfolded had an organized group of student protesters not marched through the streets of Budapest on Oct. 23 of that year, carrying loudspeakers and chanting, “This we swear, this we swear, that we will no longer be slaves.” After reading an anti-communist proclamation demanding an independent Hungary, students stormed the radio building near the Hungarian Parliament, prompting police to open fire. The violence killed one student and marked the first bloodshed in the revolution that ultimately toppled the Soviet government. You may also like: Across the country, Amish populations are on the rise 1960: Japan’s Anpo protests UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images The United States and Japan in 1960 began talks to amend a treaty known as “Anpo”–the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security–which pledged American defensive support in exchange for Japanese land use. The negotiations drew ire from citizens, some of whom worried it would start another war. Over the course of six months, student protesters broke into the prime minister’s private home, occupied the airport to ground his plane, and faced off with police using water cannons. At one point a University of Tokyo student was killed. The treaty was still ratified but the activists succeeded in pressuring the prime minister to resign. 1960-68: American civil rights protests (Greensboro to Columbia) Bettmann Archive/Getty Images While there were student-led civil rights protests in the years that preceded and followed, it was from 1960 to 1968 that the height of college civil rights activism flourished in the United States. The first major student-led event occurred when a group of Black students refused to leave an F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, launching a series of sit-ins throughout the South. Student protests continued over the next eight years; by 1968 they were at a boiling point. The movement, combined with anti-war protests, culminated in an uprising at Columbia University. There, more than 1,000 protesters took over five buildings and the dean was taken hostage. The events at Columbia were later called “the most powerful and effective student protest in modern American history.” 1962: Rangoon University protests in Myanmar Photo by Keystone/Getty Images On July 2, 1962, after a military coup overthrew parliament, students at Rangoon University in Myanmar (then Burma) gathered to voice their opposition to the new regime led by General Ne Win. The school had long been a hub for student activism, but Win’s military regime shut it down quickly, killing more than 100 protesters and blowing up the student union building. The universities were closed, and when they reopened four months later, they were under strict government control. Student activists went underground for more than two decades, meeting quietly but not resurging in public with any significant numbers until the 8888 Uprising of 1988, named for Aug. 8, 1988. 1965-75: US Vietnam War protests (SDS Teach-ins to Kent State) Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Although the Vietnam War started a decade earlier, it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the U.S. student movements picked up steam when the Students for a Democratic Society began orchestrating widespread “teach-ins” to voice opposition to the war tactics used by the U.S. government. The first of these occurred in 1965 at the University of Michigan. By 1970, tensions hit a boiling point with the Kent State tragedy in which four students were killed by the National Guard, inspiring the Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young hit “Ohio” the following year. 1968: Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City AFP // Getty Images During the summer of 1968, unrest boiled in Mexico City as it prepared to host the Olympics. In an effort to present a good face to the world, President Gustavo Díaz carried out oppressive suppression tactics, particularly with regard to labor unions. Students from multiple universities organized and held numerous demonstrations over the summer. On Oct. 2, 10 days before the games were to start, a large group marched into the plaza to hold another peaceful protest. This time, troops opened fire, killing 300 to 400 people in what came to be known as the Tlatelolco massacre. The next day, the government-controlled media painted the incident as a violent student protest; however, many now cite that day as the first in Mexico’s transition to democracy. You may also like: How gig work can help combat the loneliness epidemic 1968-1974: LGBTQ+ protests throughout the US