Dear Reader

In June, a 15-year-old named Alanna Stevenson woke up in East Palo Alto, California, ready to act.

Most people on earth still don’t have the right to assemble and speak freely. But in America, Alanna can—without even telling her parents. She posted a flyer on Instagram announcing a march to protest the death of George Floyd. Six hundred people surged into Farrell Park at the time posted on her flyer. Community elders spoke on needed changes. Then Alanna (shown above) and the crowd set off for a mile walk up University Avenue. Many didn’t know that a high school student was the force behind the day.

East Palo Alto is the city of 30,000 where I went to high school. In the heart of now-wealthy Silicon Valley, it has had to handle harsh policing, the drug trade, poverty, a foreclosure crisis. Largely Black when I attended school there, the city is largely Latino now.

A lot has changed, but one thing hasn’t. “Someone reminded me of East Palo Alto history,” says Alanna’s mom,

Shawneece, coming around to her daughter’s plan. “In East Palo Alto, we value kids’ voices.”

A few years before I enrolled, Black students at Ravenswood High protested inequities at their segregated school. That’s how a White kid like me ended up there, in a racially mixed student body. East Palo Alto kids— and their parents—never were afraid to lead. They successfully campaigned for a police force of their own when county sheriffs ran roughshod. They got a toxic-waste plant shut down. Now that history has found Alanna. “I felt like God was telling me, ‘Use your voice and use the attitude and power you have to protest for what things are right,’” she says. Police officers knelt with her to say Black lives matter. Their chief offered

Alanna support. I do too.