A New Kind of Youth - by Jon N Hale

About the Book

"The story of activist youth in America is usually framed around the Vietnam War, the counterculture, and college campuses, focusing primarily on college students in the 1960s and 1970s. But a remarkably effective tradition of Black high school student activism in the civil rights era has gone understudied. A New Kind of Youth brings high school activism into greater focus, illustrating how Black youth supported liberatory social and political movements and inspired their elders across the South"--

Book Synopsis

The story of activist youth in America is usually framed around the Vietnam War, the counterculture, and college campuses, focusing primarily on college students in the 1960s and 1970s. But a remarkably effective tradition of Black high school student activism in the civil rights era has gone understudied.

In 1951, students at R. R. Moton High School in rural Virginia led a student walkout and contacted the law firm of Hill, Martin, and Robinson in Richmond, Virginia, to file one of the five pivotal court cases that comprised the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, twenty-four Burke High School students in Charleston, South Carolina, organized the first direct action, nonviolent protest in the city at the downtown S. H. Kress department store. Months later in the small town of McComb, Mississippi, an entire high school walked out in protest of the conviction of a student who sat-in on a local Woolworth lunch counter in 1961, guiding the agenda for the historic Freedom Summer campaign of 1964. A New Kind of Youth brings high school activism into greater focus, illustrating how Black youth supported liberatory social and political movements and inspired their elders across the South.

Review Quotes

"A potent synthesis, women from Hale's original research and skillful use of new secondary work, not just another civil rights movement history. . . . Historians have documented the criminalization of Black youth, the mass firing of Black educators during desegregation, and the dismantling of cherished historically Black high schools, but Hale's contribution is the braiding of all three stories into one devastating yet essential account of the long arc of Black high school student activism."--Journal of American History

"A New Kind of Youth excels in its presentation of abundant and varied youth experiences... the book successfully makes visible what is special about youth."--Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

"Hale . . . delivers a valuable rendering of a too-little studied aspect of the modern Civil Rights Movement."--CHOICE

"Hale presents a vast array of archival sources to show that Black high schools served as vital educational and political centers in their respective communities."--Journal of Southern History