10 Times Kids Changed History 

Though we’re often told teenagers are no more than immature, hormone-addled adolescents, history tells a different story. Whether it be through their unprecedented acts of bravery or astounding intellectual achievements, their stories remind us that courage and conviction are not a matter of age, but one of action. 

1. Sacagawea 
2. Claudette Colvin 
3. Ruby Bridges 
4. Louis Braille 
5. Joan of Arc 
6. Samantha Smith 
7. Malala Yousafzai 
8. Barbara Rose Johns 
9. Karl Witte 
10. Anne Frank 

Sacagawea 

Born to the Lemhi Shoshone tribe in present-day Salmon, Idaho, a teenaged Sacagawea was sold as a child bride to French Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau around the end of the 18th century. After being approached by the Corps of Discovery—a specialized unit of the U.S. Army charged with assisting Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their famed expedition exploring the newly-acquired Louisiana Purchase territory—Charbonneau agreed to join the expedition alongside Sacagawea and their infant son to serve as guides and intermediaries between the party members and the Native American tribes they anticipated encountering. 

They traveled alongside Lewis and Clark from Camp Dubois in present-day Illinois all the way to the Pacific Coast in Oregon. The presence of Sacagawea and her young son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, seriously mitigated aggression from an understandably wary Native population (she also served as a guide and translator for the expedition). Sacagawea’s critical knowledge of edible native plants also helped the party fend off starvation on their treacherous journey through the Rocky Mountains. 

Following the conclusion of the expedition late 1806, the family was invited by Clark to settle in St. Louis, Missouri, where he offered to fund Jean Baptiste’s education at a Jesuit boarding school. It’s widely reported Sacagawea likely died from a form of typhus in late 1812—but some oral tradition posits she instead escaped her husband, crossed the Great Plains, and lived the rest of her life among a Comanche tribe until passing away in 1884. 

Claudette Colvin 

Months before Rosa Parks’s landmark arrest in 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, after refusing to surrender her seat on a segregated bus to a white woman. Colvin, a member of the NAACP Youth Council at Booker T. Washington High School, was wrongfully convicted of assaulting an officer for her protest and became one of the original plaintiffs in the seminal 1956 federal court case Browder v. Gayle, which challenged the constitutional validity of segregation laws (civil rights activist and attorney Fred Gray represented her in court).

Though Colvin’s arrest transpired months before Parks’s own, leaders in the civil rights movement were reluctant to publicize the former’s arrest out of fear her teen pregnancy could negatively impact the movement’s public perception. Colvin has expressed disappointment in being sidelined by the Civil Rights Movement—but she’s acknowledged that Parks’s age and middle class appearance made her a better choice as the face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Colvin’s undeniable contributions to the civil rights movement have been more broadly recognized in recent years; a mural honoring her was unveiled in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2021. 

Ruby Bridges 

On November 14, 1960, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges was escorted by federal agents through a sea of venomous racists protesting her entrance into William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was the first Black student to attend the elementary school amid Louisiana’s contentious school desegregation period in the wake of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that deemed racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional. 

Despite the ruling, many schools in the Deep South were resistant to desegregation and actively defied the federal orders. When Bridges began attending William Frantz, numerous white parents pulled their children from the school; all but one member of the faculty, Barbara Henry, refused to teach Bridges. Henry, whom Bridges has described as a second mother to her, taught her alone during her first year in the newly desegregated school.  

Bridges later became the subject of the famed Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With, and astounding bravery made her an overnight icon in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Louis Braille 

Louis Braille was blinded in his right eye when he was just 3 years old following an accident in his father’s workshop. An infection from the accident spread to his other eye, rendering him completely blind in both eyes. Braille received a scholarship to France’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth and began working on a tactile reading and writing system based on inventor Charles Barbier’s comparatively rudimentary system. Through perfecting and expanding Barbier’s system, Braille, then 15, was able to establish the writing system for the visually impaired that is still widely used today.

Although Braille’s system was largely complete by the mid-19th century, it didn’t become internationally adopted until 1882—about 30 years after he had died after a lifelong battle with what is believed to have been tuberculosis. 

Joan of Arc 

In 1425, 13-year-old Joan of Arc claimed to have been visited by a group of angels who presented her with a mission to save France from the Hundred Years War with England and install Charles of Valois—the disinherited crown prince of France—as king. Believing herself to be guided by God, at age 16, Joan journeyed from her home in Domrémy to Vaucouleurs, a French stronghold, to join Charles of Valois’s forces in the battle against the English. 

Joan was initially turned away. But she returned to Vaucouleurs a year later and began to amass a small following with tales of her purported visions from God. She was finally able to convince Charles and his men of her legitimacy; Charles even granted Joan an army of thousands of troops against the advice of his counselors and sent her to the city of Orléans to stave off the English invaders seeking to take the city. 

Following an extraordinary victory at Orléans, Joan’s reputation spread across France as she continued to fight for Charles against the English. She was injured in a battle at Compiègne and captured by English allies, who put her on trial for heresy and witchcraft alongside a slew of other charges. After a kangaroo court trial in Rouen, Joan was convicted and subsequently burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. She was just 19 years old. Joan’s notoriety only increased after her death and she became a longstanding martyr for the French cause before being canonized as a saint in 1920. 

Samantha Smith 

After penning a letter to Soviet politician Yuri Andropov in 1982, 10-year-old Samantha Smith became an unlikely ambassador for peace between the United States and Soviet Union. Smith’s letter, in which she plead with Andropov to avoid nuclear war with the U.S., got her a personal reply from the politician inviting her to visit the Soviet Union. Smith and her parents journeyed from their hometown of Houlton, Maine, to Moscow in the summer of 1983 to spend two weeks in the Soviet Union as Andropov’s guests. 

Smith and her family met with Russian cosmonauts and visied Artek, an international children’s center located on the Crimean Peninsula. They were welcomed back to Maine with great fanfare. Though much of the Russian media expressed goodwill toward Smith’s visit, some American news outlets speculated the girl was being used as an unwitting pawn in Soviet propaganda. 

A few months after returning from her trip to the Soviet Union, Smith was invited to attend the Children’s International Symposium in Kobe, Japan, where she spoke about her experience trying to foster goodwill between Americans and Soviets. She later secured a role as a special correspondent for a Disney Channel show covering the 1984 U.S. Presidential election and seemed well on her way to becoming a bonafide media star. 

Tragically, when returning home to Maine after filming a television segment for ABC, Samantha and her father were killed alongside four other passengers and two crew members when their flight from Logan International Airport crashed while attempting to land at the Auburn-Lewiston Airport outside Auburn, Maine. She was just 13 years old. 

Malala Yousafzai 

On October 9, 2012, Malala Yousafzai was shot in the left temple by a Taliban gunman in response to her activism opposing Taliban restrictions on girls’ education in Pakistan. An hours-long operation was able to remove the bullet from Yousafzai’s skull; she was then transported from Pakistan to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, England, for further treatment. The 15-year-old Pakistani activist spent more than a week in a medically induced coma before regaining consciousness and beginning her long journey to full recovery. Following extensive surgery to repair her facial nerve and install a cochlear implant to restore her hearing, Malala was discharged from the hospital in early 2013 and entered a temporary residence in West Midlands for further rehabilitation and treatment. 

She garnered international attention and sympathy. Malala addressed the United Nations and secured meetings with world leaders like President Barack Obama, whom she questioned about his wanton use of drone strikes in Pakistan. While continuing her activism advocating for the rights of women and girls globally, Malala became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize at just 17 years old when she was awarded the honor on December 10, 2014. 

Barbara Rose Johns 

Barbara Rose Johns was a junior at the segregated, all-Black Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, when she organized a student strike to address the disparity in resources provided to her high school and the all-white high school located nearby. After orchestrating a plan to trick the school’s principal into leaving campus, the 16-year-old assembled the school’s 450 students using a forged memorandum and addressed the crowd about her plans to organize a student strike. She approached legal representatives from the NAACP for assistance; lawyers for the organization filed a lawsuit challenging school segregation on behalf of Johns and more than 100 other students on May 13, 1951. 

Though their initial case, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, was unanimously rejected, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court as one of the consolidated cases in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case deeming school segregation to be unconstitutional. As the only case in the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit catalyzed by a student protest, Johns’s student strike is considered by some historians to be the beginning of what would later become the American Civil Rights Movement. 

Karl Witte 

By the time Karl Witte (born Johann Heinrich Friedrich Karl Witte) was 9 years old, he could already speak five languages including French, Greek, Italian, and Latin. An exhaustive book written by Witte’s father, Karl Heinrich Gottfried Witte, outlined the intensive home study program the boy underwent prior to becoming the youngest person ever to earn a Ph.D. Witte was awarded the degree when he was just 13 years old by Germany’s University of Giessen in 1814. Though the degree at the time reflected scholarly knowledge more than original research like they do today, Witte’s age and prodigious intellect nonetheless set him apart from other Ph.D.s. 

After obtaining another Ph.D. (this time in law) by the time he was 17, Witte later became an esteemed scholar of the work of Italian poet Dante Alighieri. He wrote several influential works about the Divine Comedy author.  

Anne Frank 

Following the posthumous publication of her diary chronicling her and her family’s life hiding from Nazi persecution in Amsterdam, 15-year-old Anne Frank became one of the most recognizable victims of the Holocaust. Anne was born in Frankfurt, Germany; she and her family left Germany and decamped to the Netherlands after the Nazis took control of their home country in 1934. The Frank family was eventually forced into hiding in Amsterdam, taking refuge in a series of concealed rooms in a building owned by Anne’s father, Otto Frank. 

The Franks were later found by the Nazis. Anne and her family were all sent to concentration camps, where all but Otto would eventually perish. When Otto returned to Amsterdam after being liberated from Auschwitz, he discovered Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl—who had helped hide the Frank family—had preserved Anne’s diary. The diary was published in Dutch in 1947 and translated into English in 1952. It quickly became one of the most impactful accounts of the Holocaust to date. Since its publication, Anne’s diary has sold more than 35 million copies and has been translated into over 75 languages.

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