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They learn about young Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Mississippi martyr, and Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, two young women arrested for refusing to give up their seats of Montgomery, Alabama busses months before Rosa Parks' historical refusal to attend.

They already know a bit about young Martin Luther King, just 26 when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.

I introduced them to the heroic Little Rock Nine who braved mobs to win the right to an education, and whose dignity and courage in the face of howling mobs provided inspiration to a generation of black teenagers.

They learn about four young men from North Carolina A % I University - Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair (who became Jibreel Khazan) and David Richmond – whose February 1, 1960 sit-in at a Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter set the South on fire.

They meet Fisk University's Diane Nash; sisters Mary Ann and Ruby Doris Smith, from Morris Brown and Spelman Colleges; Johnson C. Smith's Charles Jones, Virginia Union's Charles Sherrod and hundreds more who rocked the South with the 1960 sit-ins and 1961 Freedom Ride.

They learn that young people were an important part of the movement, pushing their elders to great militance, daring to take the movement to small towns and rural backwaters.

Now, it was 1993. Crowds had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, commemorating the 1963 March many of us had attended.

We were asked to witness a symbolic torch passing, a surrender of the leadership roles we had won to a young generation because...

Because they were young? Because we were old?

Because they only way they's exercise leadership was if we handed it off to them?

I turned away in dismay.

Dismay because I knew that leadership isn't handed off like batons in a relay race or given away like a piece of candy to children; it is earned through struggle and sacrifice and activism.

Dismay because no one had ever passed a torch to me I had to pry it from my elders' hands. They didn't want to let it go, whining about how the old folks wouldn't let him play grown-up.

Some of today's college-age people are justifiably angry at the old codgers from '60s movement days mouthing off about what we did when we were their age in the good old days long ago. They must be irritated at our constant reunions and celebrations where we rehash war stories of generations past. Many must wish we'd shut up or die off.

But some are doing more than hurling rhetorical darts at their elders; building on an activist organizing tradition that dates back to slavery, they are carrying forward a fight that began shortly after the first slaves set foot in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.