The year of youth protest.

Likely everyone has heard about at least one of the great youth protests of 1968. Paris. Mexico City. Rio.

The second tier is full of well-known cases as well. Prague. Karachi. Tokyo. Dakar. Chicago. Berlin. Rome. Even here, odds are that you might be unfamiliar with some.

But there were more. Abidjan, Addis, Algiers, Amsterdam, Ankara, Athens, Belfast, Belgrade, Brazzaville, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Canberra, Cape Town, Colombo, Copenhagen, Dar Es Salaam, Delhi, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Helsinki, Istanbul, Jakarta, Kampala, Khartoum, Kingston, Kolkata, Lahore, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, Melbourne, Montevideo, Montreal, Mumbai, Munich, New York, Oslo, Pisa, Rabat, Rawalpindi, San Francisco, Seoul, Stockholm, Sydney, Tehran, Tunis, Turin, Vienna, Warsaw.

And these are just the cities whose names are known around the world. There’s actually a fourth tier of major movements in minor cities few may have heard of, like Orangeburg in the United States.

Odds are, whatever you may think about the global youth movement of 1968, the truth is much, much bigger.

I. Taking on governments.

In 1968, the regime in Congo-Brazzaville was mortally weakened a unified protest movement involving the political opposition, youth, workers, and citizens of every stripe. In September, the government of Alphonse Massamba-Débat fell before a military coup that returned power to a civilian regime early the next year.

The 1968 youth uprisings in Pakistan kick-started the 1968–’69 revolution that led to the resignation of president Ayub Khan the next year.

In the United States, sitting president Lyndon Baines Johnson decided not to seek re-election in the face of massive youth protests; even without him on the ballot, his party went down to defeat in the polls in November.

In Algeria and Indonesia, the youth protests of 1968 faced off against young regimes that had taken power in coups just a few years before, holding their feet to the fire.

Meanwhile, youth in Ethiopia and Greece were not just protesting for a season. Youth unrest had been building for years, and would continue to do so until 1974, when Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and the Greek Regime of the Colonels both fell. The regime led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt wouldn’t last nearly as long, being replaced by the very different Anwar Sadat when Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970.

Simmering youth unrest in Madagascar late in the decade didn’t lead to protests in 1968, but it would a few years later, leading to founding president Philbert Tsiranana turning power over to a military regime in 1972—a move that would forestall the fall of the First Republic for only another three years.

And if the fall of Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship isn’t often linked to its 1968 protests, that is in part because the youth movement had been cresting since African students left the universities and military at the start of the decade, and would continue to do so until the Carnation Revolution of 1974.

II. Opposing war.

The American war in Vietnam inspired youth protests not just in the United States, but in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ethiopia, Australia, and throughout Asia.

In some countries, the governments were only loosely connected to the American war effort. Nonetheless, their youth looked to use what leverage they had in their own countries to make it harder for the American government to prosecute its war.

In the United States itself, students sought to curtail agreements between their universities and the department of defense for the recruitment and training of military officers. University students were often subject to draft deferrals, but other youth were not. High school students joined protests, as did youth already working in trades.

III. Improving education.

In almost every country, youth looked to redefine the social compact, and often even the very specific laws on the books, surrounding education.

Around the world, the generation that was born after the Second World War sent a greater proportion of its members to university than any earlier generation humanity had ever known. What subjects would they be asked to study? What subjects would they be allowed to study? Who were their professors, and what did these professors believe about the world? Were the universities engaged in research programs with environmental, social, or even war-making risks?

In France and several of its former colonies, protesting students looked to protect or at least to rely on what was called the “university franchise,” according to which police could not be sent onto campuses without being called by the head of the university.

For centuries, the university franchise had been an informal compact guaranteeing independent governance of institutes of higher education. In May and June 1968, students in Paris and Dakar especially sought not only to protest government policy, but to use the campus as a haven for progressive organization beyond the long arm of conservative governments.

Both presidents Charles De Gaulle of France and Léopold Sédar Senghor of Dakar took strong exception to the student and labor unions displaying solidarity in opposition to their governments.

De Gaulle’s party did well in the elections that followed the protest, but eventually wrote certain limited protections for the university franchise into national legislation through the Fauré law. Senghor, like De Gaulle, initially cracked down violently on protesters, but by the end of the year conceded most of their demands as he sought to consolidate his shaken political power.

IV. Asserting political power.

In almost every country, the postwar generation in 1968 protested to get out from under the thumb of prior generations not yet ready to share power.

In the United States, protesting youth were unhappy with the slow rate of progress in the dismantling of segregationist regimes. In South African universities, the ambition was more modest: preventing the extension of apartheid policies into campus spaces.

In Brazil and Czechoslovakia, students were tired of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that cracked down on nearly all forms of dissent, difference, and disadvantage.

A new generation was stepping onto the world stage.