Last month, after the shooting at Santa Fe High School, in Texas, the activists of Parkland, Florida, decided that it was better not to comment. “The MFOL team will not be speaking on today’s tragedy in Santa Fe,” one student whom I texted for an interview in the immediate aftermath of the event responded, referring to the group that organized the March for Our Lives gun-control demonstration this spring. “We would like for them to tell their story.” Another student was more terse: “If you wanna talk to someone, please go to Texas.”

I didn’t go to Texas, but I did go to Chicago, where the student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School began their twenty-state tour through America on June 15th, attending the annual Peace March and Rally at Saint Sabina Church, the city’s largest African-American Catholic congregation, located in the South Side neighborhood of Auburn Gresham. On “The Road to Change,” as the tour is called, Parkland students will educate young voters about the March for Our Lives platform and visit politicians who oppose their agenda. The students will also, according to their Web site, “meet fellow survivors and use our voices to amplify theirs.” The Parkland students were leaders, but uncomfortable ones. The kind of attack they experienced, although far too common, is still a rare and extraordinary thing—two-thirds of the firearm deaths in the United States are suicides, and most others are homicides, with only a fraction of those being mass shootings. The students understood that they are examples of America’s gun problem but also outliers. As such, their intention to let other activists speak to their own circumstances was both honest and good. On the other hand, a movement needs leaders. In advertising for the first march of the summer, the former Parkland student Emma González was listed as a headliner, alongside Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, Gabby Giffords, and will.i.am.

The Parkland students had first met with student activists from the South and West Sides of Chicago back in early March, less than three weeks after the shooting in Florida. The meeting, which was held at González’s parents’ house, had been closed to the media, but the next day González posted some photos, showing the now familiar and mostly white student activists from Stoneman Douglas with some other young people, all of them African-American, sitting around her parents’ screened-in swimming pool.

“I’ve never seen someone so excited to meet strangers before,” D’Angelo McDade, an eighteen-year-old who went on the trip to Florida, recently recalled of González. “She’s like, ‘Can I hug you guys?’ ” The meeting had been proposed by Arne Duncan, the former Secretary of Education under Barack Obama, and was paid for by the Emerson Collective, the philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, where Duncan is a managing partner.

The young people went out to the pool behind González’s house while their older chaperones stayed inside. They played get-to-know-you games because, McDade said, “the amount of trauma that Parkland students and some of our Chicago students had gone through just that week and that month alone is too dramatic to constantly talk about it.”

Then they started talking. The students from Chicago talked about living with the constant fear that they or a loved one would be killed, and shared their philosophy of nonviolence. The Parkland students discussed their then-nascent platform of demands for lawmakers—universal background checks, a high-capacity-magazine ban, funding for gun-violence research, and other policy prescriptions. “We learned more from the Parkland kids about the politics side, whereas they learned more from our point of view about the everyday reality of living in Chicago,” a student from Chicago named Audrey Wright told me.

A couple of weeks later, McDade got a call from González, in which she asked him to speak at the March for Our Lives rally. When I asked whether it bothered him that the media had paid so much attention to Parkland, McDade showed no resentment. “To walk out on that stage, and you’re giving this speech, and you actually feel as if someone is actually listening? It was a new experience,” McDade said. “We, especially us from the city of Chicago, especially attending schools in North Lawndale, West Humboldt Park, and Garfield, we feel as if no one is listening.”

I talked to McDade and Wright the day before the Road to Change rally, at their high school, North Lawndale College Prep, a public charter school on the West Side. The North Lawndale campus, on South Christiana Avenue, is in a mid-twentieth-century building, with shiny wooden floors, high ceilings, and mustard-yellow lockers. The décor was motivational: a mural showed Gandhi and Che Guevara. On the walls hung pennants and college flags from universities across the country, many of which charge tuition that is significantly higher than the median household income in North Lawndale, which is around $22,500. Classes had ended early, in late May, and on the day of my visit desks and chairs had been stacked for cleaning and the scent of ammonia filled the air.

Audrey Wright led me carefully down the creaking floorboards of the second floor so as not to interrupt a documentary about youth activism that was being shot for the A&E Network. When McDade emerged, he was dressed formally, in a summery pink button-down shirt, black trousers, and velvet loafers. At the March for Our Lives rally this spring, he and another North Lawndale student, Alex King, had walked onstage wearing matching blue sweatshirts and with their fists raised. They wore tape over their mouths, which they then removed to talk about the six hundred and fifty people who died from gun violence in Chicago last year, the seven hundred and seventy-one who died in 2016, and their own experiences of fear and death. It may not have been obvious from their speeches, but McDade and King come from a different tradition of activism than that of the Parkland students, who cleverly troll the National Rifle Association on social media, rattle off statistics, and seek out discussion with politicians. McDade, King, Wright, and their classmates are more likely to quote the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., than a SpongeBob meme or a study from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Their policy priorities reflect their immediate circumstances—they speak less of gun control than the need for more youth-employment opportunities, mental-health resources, and funding for the public schools they attend. Their experience of gun violence is not of a single traumatic emergency but of a chronic problem that is only one instance of the social inequality around them. McDade told me that, during a school town-hall meeting on violence, when the audience was asked who knew at least thirty people who had been shot, eighty-five per cent of the people in the room had raised their hands. Although they have more reasons to be angry than most people their age, they radiate peace and compassion. As this movement begins to form a national coalition, they are its philosophers, its bodhisattvas.

D’Angelo McDade at the March for Our Lives rally, in Washington, D.C. Photograph by Noam Galai / WireImage / Getty

McDade, Wright, and King’s activism began in a program at North Lawndale called the Peace Warriors. Tiffany Childress Price, a chemistry teacher at North Lawndale, started the program in 2009, in an attempt to reduce the number of violent confrontations in the halls. The program trains peer mediators in the six principles of nonviolence, which veterans of the civil-rights movement drew from the work of Dr. King. (“Principle One: Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.”) Since its inception, the program has grown to include a hundred and twenty-six students, and the number of fights at school has dropped from ninety in 2009 to thirteen or fourteen during the past school year. At a school with around sixteen hundred and fifty students and only two counsellors, the Peace Warriors monitor social media to intervene in conflicts, hold mediation sessions known as “peace circles,” and occasionally break up fights—which they call “interrupting nonsense.” They are also “interjectors of love and kindness.” They post birthday cards on lockers, and when a student has experienced a loss or trauma they do a “condolence run” to his or her classroom, where they give the student a bag of candy, a card, and a hug. This school year, they performed a hundred and seventy such runs.