In 2024, when Jeremiah Treece was a high school senior in Montgomery, Alabama, he noticed that his city’s flag reflected the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws, so he set about trying to change it. It’s a daunting challenge to change a city’s flag, but Jeremiah said the seven stars in the current flag, adopted in 1952, represented the seven states of the Confederacy, and the gold wreath represented “honor and glory.” Montgomery, a two-time All-America City, is “the heart of the civil rights movement,” Jeremiah said, “and symbols like this symbolize what the city stands for, and I don’t think anyone would want to be in a city that stands for division.”
Over the next two years, Jeremiah gathered over a thousand signatures in support of his initiative to change the flag, and, along the way, he worked with a group to design a new flag without the previous symbols. In May 2026, a month before the city won its second designation as an All-America City, the Montgomery City Council voted 6-1 in support of Jeremiah’s proposal. The Council’s vote approved a new flag designed by another local student that features nine stars, one for each city council district.
The work in Montgomery by Jeremiah Treece is just one example of how young people are getting involved in civic affairs. It’s also a good example of why cities should engage young people: many of the challenges our communities face are issues they care about and often directly involve them. For challenges like mental health, substance abuse, crime, health, and economic well-being, the best solutions start with young people, who now comprise a third of our population nationwide…