"I Called the Police": Principals Respond to Student Unrest in the Rural South During Desegregation

• In Event: 56.028 - Our Bodies, Our Diction: Educational Equality Articulated Through the Activism of Youth After Brown

Abstract

Introduction and Purpose: In March 1969 the National Association for Secondary Principals reported that 59% of high schools and 56% of junior high schools had experienced some form of student protest. Responding to this “state of crisis,” practitioner journals (i.e., The Clearing House, Phi Delta Kappan, School Management, and The High School Journal) from 1968 to 1972 published a plethora of articles about how school administrators should handle student unrest on their campuses. With titles such as “Organizational response to student militancy in the secondary school” and “Revolutionaries who have to be home by 7:30,” these articles offered school administrators strategies for dealing with strife and various analyses of the root causes of youth unrest in the late 1960s. Rife with examples from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, these articles were clearly geared towards administrators in urban areas. Indeed, Samuel Brodbelt makes the claim in a 1970 article in The High School Journal that “the small rural schools have yet to evidence the protest movements in urban America” (364). In this presentation, we focus on Mississippi and the multitude of protests staged by Black students during school desegregation. We pay particular attention to how principals responded to the unrest in their schools and juxtapose their responses to the professional discourse about handling student unrest.

Research Design: The findings of this study emanate from a large research study of school desegregation in Mississippi (book to be published in 2017 by the University Press of Mississippi). Data is derived from interviews with over 100 principals, teachers, students, superintendents, parents, community activists and school board members directly involved in the desegregation of Mississippi schools, archival data (e.g., newspapers), and an analysis of practitioner journal articles published between 1968-1972 dealing with student unrest.

Summary of Findings: In academic journals, one would think that the South was immune to student activism, despite the fact that it was during these years (1968-1971) that the Deep South was embroiled in a tumultuous period of school desegregation, brought about primarily through court-enforcement. In Mississippi, Black students and their parents boycotted a number of school districts for desegregation plans based on racist assumptions. For example Blacks, in protest of the Coffeeville district’s plan to implemented sex-segregated schools, boycotted the schools for an entire school year. In Clarksdale, they boycotted the schools in protest to the proposed use of achievement test scores to place students. Throughout the state Black students staged massive walkouts (e.g., Rankin County, Greenville, Harrison County) resulting in many being arrested. In Ruleville 31 Black students were arrested during a protest after Joetha Collier was murdered on the streets of Drew less than an hour after she graduated from the first integrated class at Drew High School. In Riverside High School, the principal implemented a policy at his newly integrated school prohibiting mustaches and beards. When 41 Black students refused to shave their facial hair, he expelled them all in the name of “maintaining strict discipline to prevent mayhem.” The principal was court-ordered to reinstate them all.

Authors

• Natalie G. Adams, The University of Alabama

• Jim Adams, Mississippi State University