Youth Leadership in Montgomery, Alabama, and Beyond

In 2024, when Jeremiah Treece was a high school senior in Montgomery, Alabama, he noticed that his city’s flag reflected the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws, so he set about trying to change it. It’s a daunting challenge to change a city’s flag, but Jeremiah said the seven stars in the current flag, adopted in 1952, represented the seven states of the Confederacy, and the gold wreath represented “honor and glory.” Montgomery, a two-time All-America City, is “the heart of the civil rights movement,” Jeremiah said, “and symbols like this symbolize what the city stands for, and I don’t think anyone would want to be in a city that stands for division.”

Over the next two years, Jeremiah gathered over a thousand signatures in support of his initiative to change the flag, and, along the way, he worked with a group to design a new flag without the previous symbols. In May 2026, a month before the city won its second designation as an All-America City, the Montgomery City Council voted 6-1 in support of Jeremiah’s proposal. The Council’s vote approved a new flag designed by another local student that features nine stars, one for each city council district.

The work in Montgomery by Jeremiah Treece is just one example of how young people are getting involved in civic affairs. It’s also a good example of why cities should engage young people: many of the challenges our communities face are issues they care about and often directly involve them. For challenges like mental health, substance abuse, crime, health, and economic well-being, the best solutions start with young people, who now comprise a third of our population nationwide.

It’s easy to agree in principle that youth should be engaged, but there is also a value proposition for youth engagement: their involvement has been shown to add value and accomplish important goals. Beyond the work by Jeremiah and his supporters in Montgomery, here are a few other examples of ways in which youth engagement has benefited communities:

• As part of their work to prevent and mitigate climate change, a group of young people in San Antonio worked with the school district to establish schools as “resilience hubs,” safe, trusted spaces to support their communities during emergencies, with each school prepared to provide families with the information and resources they need.

• A nonprofit youth organization in Somerville, Massachusetts, the Center for Teen Empowerment, engaged teenagers to help reduce crime, resulting in a 50% decrease in juvenile crime between 2007 and 2014, with arrests for youth ages 10-24 declining 84%, from 126 arrests to 20 during that time period.

• A group of 15 students in Salinas, CA, created a way to promote fitness and alternatives to cars, the city’s first Ciclovía, 14 years ago, an annual youth-led event that continues to draw thousands of participants.

The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University cites four types of benefits from youth civic engagement:

• Democracy is stronger because it is more representative;
• Communities are more resilient and more able to address important issues;
• Benefits to youths themselves in terms of skills learned and habits formed; and
• Equity is improved, since underrepresentation leads to marginalization.

CIRCLE has conducted research to show the benefits of youth civic engagement, while at the same time emphasizing the need to equalize opportunities for engagement among youth of different races and economic status. In a study done during the COVID 19 pandemic, CIRCLE showed that youth with civic access and participation were experiencing better wellbeing, although those without as much access—like without internet service for example—were experiencing fewer benefits. Another CIRCLE study found that youths who leave high school but do not continue to college are less civically connected, in part due to various barriers.

There are dozens of ways to create meaningful opportunities for youth civic engagement, and many of the League’s All-America Cities have incorporated this engagement as part of their civic muscle. As we celebrate America 250, please don’t forget that it was, in part, rebellious youth that fueled the revolution. After all some of the founding “fathers” included James Madison, who was 25 in 1776, Thomas Jefferson, age 33, and Alexander Hamilton, age 21!

Doug Linkhart is the President of the National Civic League.