2007 Youth Scholar — Jacquieta Beverly, Tennyson High School, Oakland, Calif.
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Jacquieta has been involved in several civil liberties and social justice issues including the death penalty, military recruitment, economic justice, educational equity, and discrimination against immigrant communities.
Early in her high school career, after discovering the problem of under-funding for California schools, Jacquieta worked with Students Taking Action Now for Democracy (STAND), petitioning the governor and lawmakers in Sacramento to end school under-funding in California.
In her sophomore and junior years, Jacquieta started her own student organization, Action for Social Justice, to fight military recruitment on campus, educating students and faculty members about the “poverty draft” and the targeting of young people of color.
Jacquieta has been a passionate leader within the Youth Activist Committee (YAC) of the ACLU of Northern California’s Howard A. Friedman Education Project, which creates opportunities for high school students to examine the Bill of Rights. YAC’s youth activists coordinate an annual Youth Rights Conference for hundreds of their peers, facilitate workshops on civil liberties issues, participate in activism projects throughout the year, and are involved in weeklong summer field investigations on subjects of their choice. As a teen leader of YAC, Jacquieta was chosen to participate in the National ACLU Membership Conference.
Jacquieta hopes to become a lawyer and continue to fight injustice.
Jacquieta's Personal Essay:
"Who Would I Be If I Never Asked Why?"
Who would I be if I never asked "why?" My curiosity started long before I knew what I could do besides just asking "why?"or "what I can do to help or change this?" thought of it as a really bad childhood habit that I took with me as I got older. As I child "why" was my word. It was my way of communicating. When my mom would say, "Jacquieta lets go", "we are going home", my reply was always "Why? My Granny was everything to me. As a child I remember her thing was reading the newspaper and watching the news, and as I got older that was where I learned that "why?" meant so much more. I don't remember saying much of anything else and eventually it became a way for me to figure out just how messed up things are in the world. And how often people rights are getting violated and stepped on.
When I began school I was so excited. It was a new environment and a new place that I could ask "why?" and see what I would be told. But to my surprise the more I asked, the more my teachers told me, the more I learned and wanted to do something to make a difference. High school has had a particularly important influence on who I am today. I have had some amazing teachers. And with their help I have done some incredible things. My sophomore year I asked "why?" in my history class and from there I started a letter campaign for education. I read the budget that Governor Schwarzenegger proposed and I saw that he was taking money from education after making campaign promises to give money and support to schools. As a student in the public school system I felt that my right to get a quality education was being stripped from me. When I read the RAND report, which stated California school funding was below average, I felt like I had to do something. and something fast. Some classmates and I got together with STAND (Students Taking Action Now for Democracy), a program at school. We put on presentations and organized other students to write letters expressing to the governor the importance of money for education and what we could use that money for. We then went down to the capital and handed over about 500 hundred letters to the mailroom. From there I got to talk to two Senators and two Representatives about the fact that our schools need money to function and how students are affected when funding is taken away. From that moment on I stopped asking "why?" and "what can I do?" and started taking whatever action I could to make a difference
My junior year I started a new club for students to take action on different topics that affect our rights. My club, Action For Social Justice helped me feel like I was doing something that could lead to real change. We worked hard to get military recruiters off our campus. Military recruiters are all over our campus giving students false information and working hard to get us to go and fight in an unjust war. Why? We passed out opt out forms and other information to students. Through a class assignment I got to know the Stanley Tookie Williams case very well. That led me to get involved with the fight to end the death penalty. Tookie's case made me see how wrong it was to kill a man that changed himself so that he could help put an end to the violence in the streets. My question is, what makes murder in any form okay? From there I got involved with the immigrants' rights movement. I went to marches and started doing everything I could to let the government know that what they were planning to do was wrong in so many ways. I know many people personally that this would have affected and I felt like I had to stand with them.
In the spring I got to go to the ACLU student rights conference. That was a remarkable experience for me. I had already done a lot during the past two years, but going to that conference opened many more doors. One of my incredible teachers got me to sign up for the Friedman Project and to my surprise I got picked to go on the trip last summer, an experience that I will never forget. I learned a lot about economic injustice and how it affects people in such a negative way on a deeper level, and it made me want to do more. I decided to join the Youth Action Team within the organization Alternatives To War Through Education (AWE). Working with the ACLU gave me the opportunity to go to Washington DC to the Members Conference. There I got to go Capital Hill and lobby with Congress about the bills they want to pass that had to do with wire tapping, immigration, and racial profiling. I didn't need to ask "why?" I already, knew what I was there for. I am still working on making my club at school something that will be remembered for taking action to stand up for people's rights and make a difference, even in a small way.
As I go on to college next year I don't think I will be asking "why?" as much but more questions like "what's my next step?" or "What issue do I fight for now?" College is a change that I'm ready for, and I won't have the luxury of asking "why?" and having one of my teachers come and just tell me why this is the way it is and ask "what are you going to do?" It's going to be me asking that question "why?" Then I will realize that I am the one that is left to answer the question and however I answer it I have to know and believe in myself a lot more than I have. I just want to keep doing what's in my heart and that is to help fight against injustice that affects people's rights. And to think I wasn't going to ask "why?" Who would I be if I never asked "why?" That is one question I don't want the answer to.