On Monday, September 28, Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian will be in conversation with historians Aaron G. Fountain Jr. and Jon N. Hale about high school student organizing and state repression. Fountain is the author of High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America and Hale wrote A New Kind of Youth: Historically Black High Schools and Southern Student Activism, 1920–1975.
As Fountain noted in an article for Time,
When people think of student activism, they typically picture college campuses. Yet, during the 1960s and 1970s, teenagers built social movements that intersected with broader grassroots struggles and responded to both local and national issues. This activism is little remembered today, in part because it remained largely localized and national coverage was short lived. But these youth-led movements have had a long-lasting impact on school districts across the United States, and they can provide young people today with clues as to what enables successful student activism.
Students on Main Street, Farmville, Virginia, July 1963, #014, VCU Libraries Digital Collections.
The Children’s March for Survival passes by the White House in Washington, D.C March 25, 1972. Source: Washington Area Spark
Police send a group of African American school children to jail in Birmingham, Ala. on May 4, 1963. (Bill Hudson/AP)
A police officer taking picket signs from young students protesting against segregation on May 3, 1963, during the Birmingham Children’s Crusade in Alabama. Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Ed Jones, Birmingham News.
Group portrait of some of the more than 100 students named in the legal case ‘Dorothy Davis, et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia,’ a lawsuit filed to seek, initially, repairs for Robert Moton High School, a segregated school in Farmville, Virginia, March 1953. The case was later, on appeal, attached to the landmark ‘Brown vs Board of Education’ case. Among those pictured is Dorothy E. Davis (center, with glasses), for whom the suit was named. Source: Moton Museum
Aaron G. Fountain Jr. is a historian and public scholar. His book High School Students Unite! was a finalist for the 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. His articles have been published in Time, Smithsonian Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Hill, and more. He has begun work on his second book, which is a cultural and political history of teenagers and the Vietnam War in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Jon N. Hale is professor and associate head of education policy, organization and leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to A New Kind of Youth, Hale is also the author of The Choice We Face: How Segregation, Race, and Power Have Shaped America’s Most Controversial Education Reform Movement and The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, and co-editor of Schooling the Movement: The Activism of Southern Black Educators from Reconstruction Through the Civil Rights Era and To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools.
ASL interpretation provided.
Professional development credit certificate provided upon request for attendees.
These online classes with people’s historians are held at least once a month (generally on Mondays) at 4:00 pm PT / 7:00 pm ET for 75 minutes. In each session, the historian is interviewed by a teacher and breakout rooms allow participants to meet each other in small groups, discuss the content, and share teaching ideas. We designed the sessions for teachers and other school staff. Parents, students, and others are also welcome to participate.
Find related resources below and in the collection, And the Youth Shall Lead Us: Framing the Movement Stories of Young People on the Frontlines of U.S. Social Movements.
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