Learning to Protest: African American High Schools and the Education of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 1865-1970

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

This research examines the history of activism in African American high schools across the American South between 1930 and 1970. This research, generously funded by the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, reconstructs the history of student and teacher activism in locations across the south, including: Jackson, MS; Baton Rouge, LA; Charleston, SC; Montgomery and Birmingham, AL; and Prince Edward County, VA. Black civic leaders since Reconstruction worked with northern philanthropists or Southern moderate progressives to raise the capital needed for secondary schools. Black educators simultaneously organized a professional middle class based on access to these new levels of education. By the 1920s, civil rights organizations such as the NAACP conceptualized “youth” as an age-distinct group with political organizing capacity. Young people by the 1950s and 1960s inherited a long history of racially appropriate and politically influenced education, which provided a foundation for civil rights-based activism. While high school protest occurred across the country, these cities illustrate the dynamic contextual interplay between students, teachers, and the NAACP, and demonstrate how the historically black high school inculcated an overlooked foundation of the Civil Rights Movement.

In providing the history of black high schools and examining their role during the Civil Rights Movement, this research highlights five major points:

1) Southern urban progressivism shaped the origins of black high schools, many of which were elitist institutions located on university campuses;

2) Black high schools prior to 1940 were mostly privately funded, which created autonomy for black educators to implement a progressive curriculum;

3) African American teachers organized professional associations that provided the space for democratic and collective discourse during the Jim Crow Era;

4) Social Scientists propagated a construction of adolescence in the early 1900s, which embodied passive conceptions of youth that shaped youth organizing of the NAACP and the Southern Negro Youth Congress;

5) Aforementioned factors coalesced by the 1950s, which precipitated youth-based notions of autonomy that galvanized high school student-led local movements. These demonstrations of youth shaped the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and other major milestones of the movement.

Author

• Jon Hale, College of Charleston