Before the Boycotts: Youth Organizing and Direct Action

Historians like Jeanne Theoharis and V.P. Franklin have noted that histories of the civil rights movement often focus on adults, despite the crucial role played by young people.¹ For the most part, when the organizing and activist efforts of young people have been recognized, the focus has been on college students. However, middle and high school students have long taken part in demonstrations and even organized their own. To understand how a school boycott which included nearly 500,000 students took place, it is necessary to recognize the longer history of student activism from which the school boycotts drew. It’s also important to understand what conditions motivated young people to protest.

Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); V. P. Franklin, The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021). ↩︎