OAKLAND — With a smile stretching from ear to ear, a girl with dreadlocked hair and purple rain boots yelled, “Mic check!” — initiating a chant among others sitting in a circle at Abundant Beginnings summer camp.

“What do you want?” she shouted confidently. “Justice!” other campers replied. “When do you want it?” she followed. “Now!”

The chant echoed across Oakland’s Lake Temescal on a sunny summer day, just as shouts from Black Lives Matter or other civil rights protesters resonate on overcast nights in downtown Oakland.

But these weren’t the voices of typical protesters.

Leading the chant was 3-year-old Jonnie-mae Taylor, of Berkeley.

While some Bay Area children spent their summers sharpening their math skills or playing group sports, Jonnie-mae and other campers — about 20 of them on this day, between 2 and 10 years old — learned about social responsibility and justice during outdoor activities.

The camp is one of many places kids are testing their voices about social issues. In a handful of recent Bay Area demonstrations against police violence involving people of color, those leading the chanting and carrying signs were children and teenagers — often encouraged by parents or older youth eager to impart critical life skills at a time when tensions are high across the country.

At one Oakland rally, a 14-year-old girl who chose to remain anonymous, referencing the Anonymous group that organized the event, danced, laughed and chanted with her friends, carrying a “Black Lives Matter” banner. When the young protesters faced a line of officers blocking a highway onramp, she yelled at them, asking why they were afraid of a 14-year-old girl.

Semere Mengistu, 18, one of the organizers of a youth march and rally at City Hall in San Jose that same night, said the rallies were “our way of just raising the consciousness of our youth” and to get them to “pay attention — this is what really matters, reprioritize your life.”

“When you learn about these issues, we can come together as a community and decide to do something,” said Mengistu, a graduate of Del Mar High School in San Jose who plans to attend UC Riverside this fall. He talked about the rallies growing in size, but also about getting police involved in them.

“Maybe we can bridge the divide between the community and the police,” he said. “Maybe we can build more trust.”

Kyle Dacallos, 17, of Milpitas, was there, too, motivated after shootings across the country to be a leader in making change. He had only been to one other rally before that night, but felt it “spreads awareness and makes people open their minds.”

He said he has been racially profiled before, but the July police shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, drove him to become more involved.

“That’s the one that really pushed it,” he said, “I was, like, ‘OK, something’s got to happen now.'”

Almost a week later, a Black Lives Matter National Day of Action event was attended mostly by families, some with small children, but also with teenagers.

As they gathered at Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, Abundant Beginnings camp Executive Director Shayna Cureton and activists from Rice and Beans Cooperative and Showing Up for Racial Justice talked with children about why families gathered for a protest. Older children focused on police issues and wrote letters to Oakland police officers.

Cureton led them in a chant of, “Power, power, power to the people,” next to an altar children created using photos, tissue paper, crayons and flowers to honor people who were killed by police.

“I feel like children have this innate sense of fairness. They can see if their families aren’t being treated respectfully by their peers, authorities, teachers …,” said Lindsay Hong, executive director for the Rice and Beans Cooperative. “What we’re trying to do is give them more information and help them recognize what’s happening.”

During the march to Oakland police headquarters, Kingston and Kaden Pagani, 6 and 8, were in the front while their mother Abby Pagani, carrying their 3-year-old brother, Kellen, followed. The older boys held signs that read “Black Lives Matter” and “Racism isn’t born. It’s taught.”

Kingston and Kaden also wrote letters and handed them to motorcycle officers at the rally. “Police, you should help people, not hurt people,” Kingston wrote. “To the police: You should stop and slow down and maybe ask black people how they feel. P.S. Black Lives Matter,” Kaden wrote.

Before going to the event, Pagani worried because she was aware that some protests against police turn violent. But she went anyway, with her family, because she wanted her three black sons to see “that people who don’t look like them are here standing up for their lives.”

Shauna Castro-McDaniel, a family psychologist in Alameda, pointed out that exposure to social justice issues is not new for children growing up in the diverse Bay Area, noting that many of them confront those issues every day, whether they witness or experience it firsthand, or through the experiences of loved ones.

Participating in rallies, she said, provides them an outlet to speak up and an opportunity to feel empowered.

“Oftentimes youth are oppressed by ageism, resulting in feeling like their voice isn’t valued in their family or society,” Castro-McDaniel said. “When children, teens participate in rallies and protests it provides a community of people lifting their voices so their voice is amplified.”

Mara Benitez of Oakland said she doesn’t want to overwhelm her daughter, Lullah Benitez-Edwards, with stories about police violence, but she wants her daughter to be aware of issues that impact minorities.

She recalled when Lullah, 9, heard about the fatal police shootings in July of Philando Castile in Minneapolis and Sterling. Benitez and Lullah were visiting family in Massachusetts at the time, and Lullah’s father was safe in the East Bay. But she wanted to call him anyway.

“When it hits around particularly black men being unsafe, she personally is concerned about her dad,” Benitez said. “Her biggest fear was, ‘If that’s happening, is my dad safe right now?'”

The Abundant Beginnings camp helped Lullah by addressing everything from racial bias to social justice to peaceful activism in concepts that kids can grasp. For example, “things that are fair and not fair,” are discussed, Cureton said, or they talk about how racial bias might play into decisions people, including police, might make about other people.

Benitez said that conversations she overhears between Lullah and her peers show her that children “are feeling more empowered to really demand” what generations of activists before them also demanded.

“There are groups of kids in the Bay Area, not just my kid, who are undergoing that kind of consciousness raising,” she said. “In this time, in these days, with things being so dark, it is something that I certainly think gives me hope.”

Staff Writer Jason Green contributed to this report. Contact Katrina Cameron at 925-945-4782. Follow her at Twitter.com/KatCameron91.