Black High School Protest in the United States, 1960-1980

• In Event: Roundtable Session 66
  In Roundtable Session: Topics in African American Education During the Postwar Era

Abstract

This paper examines a time of protest and controversy in black high schools during the 1960s and 70s, when secondary schooling became a focal point of protests for African Americans. Drawing upon a range of sources, the paper considers the experiences of Black youth in high schools across the country as they dealt with these issues.
Recent historical work on the period dealing with black education does not consider these questions (Patterson, 2002). The greatest number of studies dealt with “adjustments” that Black and White students made to integrated high schools, and there were a number of contemporaries who also published accounts of the conditions inside of urban secondary institutions that had become predominantly black (Bolmer and Vedlitz, 1971; Mirel, 1999).
African American students had long been active participants in the Civil Rights Movement, and had initiated protest activity in the schools (de Schweinitz, 2009). But the level of protest reached new highs in the latter 1960s. In examining issues of student protest, this study draws upon hundreds of articles published in five African American newspapers during the decade, the Chicago Defender, The Pittsburg Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, the Atlanta Daily World and the Los Angeles Sentinel. The paper draws also upon archival material from the Youth Division of the NAACP held at the Library of Congress. The largest civil rights youth group in the country, with about 65,000 members at its peak, Youth Division chapters across the country became active in student protest. There is fragmentary evidence of the involvement of local Black Panther groups and other organizations in contributing to organized protest by African American high school students (Theodaris and Woodard, 2003).
In the end, however, it appears that the bulk of protest activity by black secondary students was rather spontaneous in orientation. During the 1960s there was conflict over question of desegregation and integration, with Black students often being threatened or attacked (Patterson, 2001; Ravitch, 1982). Later in the decade, Black students protested perceived inequities in school resources and curricular issues, particularly the teaching of black history and literature, and these issues carried over into the seventies. It was not until the very end of the 1970s that a relative calm settled over the Black students enrolled in American secondary institutions. By that time integration had largely reached its limits, curricular reform was slowing substantially, and protest was relatively rare.
The paper closes with a brief discussion of changes in Black high school student culture during these years. Judging from yearbooks photos and newspaper evidence, black pride and black power themes became increasingly evident in the latter 1960s, and remained popular well into the 1970s. The lessons of this for the future moment in American high school history are a topic for Americans to consider as the advances achieved during the era of equity and desegregation are gradually reversed today.

Author

• John L. Rury, The University of Kansas