On any given day, Cameron Samuels and Da’Taeveyon Daniels are hard at work. Alongside their academic and extracurricular pursuits, Samuels and Daniels serve as Executive Director and Deputy Executive Director of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT). As one of the NCAC’s 23 Right to Read Network (RRN) affiliates, SEAT stands out as a truly grassroots, young-people-centered organization advocating for change and educational freedom.
SEAT has achieved incredible feats since its founding through introducing bills to the Texas legislature, organizing student advocacy days at the Texas capitol, and growing its network to span across Texas–impacting thousands of students in the process. Even for Daniels, it is hard to believe that all of this stemmed from an email he received from Gianmarco Antosca, the NCAC’s Youth Free Expression Coordinator, on the bus to school.
“He connected me and Cameron,” Daniels said. “And, I thought, now I finally have someone in the state who is actually doing the work on the ground.”
Both Daniels and Samuels acknowledged that being put in touch with one another made all the difference in their ability to take steps toward building a network of students, advocates, and allies. Speaking about how being a part of the RNN has impacted SEAT’s work, Samuels stressed the importance of understanding how far reaching the impacts of book banning are and coalition-building with other organizations.
“We recognize that book banning doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” Samuels said. “Partnerships with organizations like NCAC empower generations of leaders to build upon and learn from one another.”
Along with being a co-founder of SEAT, Daniels also serves as the only student representative on the NCAC Advisory Council. As an alumnus of the NCAC’s Student Advocates for Speech (SAS) Program, Daniels looked back on his experience fondly. He recalled how it encouraged him to start his own SAS chapter at his high school, which he grew immensely from the original group of five students.
“So many of those students saw themselves in those books,” Daniels said. “I wanted to continue to build this momentum through things like creating posters of banned books and putting them in the hall even when the administrators told us it was not a good idea to do so.”
By the time Daniels left the SAS chapter he had founded to allow for new leadership, the group spanned two districts with over 400 students advocating for student speech and education rights. Given the immense growth of the student movement in Texas, both Samuels and Daniels have been thrust into the spotlight as student activists and spokespersons for the issue of book banning and education freedom.
“It has been quite something to be considered a student activist, but there should not just be these ‘in or out’ compartments of society when it comes to activism,” Samuels said. “Politics is going to do you if you don’t do politics. Everyone needs to be an activist in their own way.”
Looking toward the future, Daniels and Samuels recognize that there is a challenging road ahead, given a conservative stronghold in the federal government for at least the next two years, along with a heightened movement to censor in Texas state politics. For Samuels, the NCAC’s decades of relentless advocacy amidst such immense change gives them inspiration.
“It is important that we recognize that we have not lost, we still have each other,” Samuels said. “We don’t have to treat winning as having zero losses.”