The Young Crusaders

December 15, 2020
Lively history of the teenagers and young adults who fought some of the hardest battles of the civil rights movement. Franklin, a former professor of history and education, begins with a moment unknown to most students of the civil rights era: its largest single demonstration, "not the August 1963 March on Washington, but the system-wide school boycott in New York City on February 3, 1964, when over 360,000 elementary and secondary school students went on strike." Across the nation, schools became battlegrounds, with the students who integrated such places as Lanier High School in small-town Mississippi, some of them fresh from sitting in at a lunch counter in Jackson, serving as frontline soldiers. They were subject to verbal and physical abuse, and one young woman who answered back was expelled from Little Rock's Central High School. Franklin reports the absurdities built into public school systems around the country as they integrated, willingly or not. In Milwaukee, for instance, Black students were bused to a White school in the morning, bused back to their old school for lunch, then bused back to the White school for afternoon classes. The young people who rose up in protest were sometimes brave, sometimes merely sick and tired, as when, nine months before Rosa Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to relinquish her seat on a public bus. "I was just angry," she explained. "Like any teenager might be. I was downright angry." No matter what their motivation, the students eventually won allies--the adult leaders of the civil rights movement, of course, but also Mexican American and White students who, radicalized in the later 1960s, took their side. The author finds reason for the struggle to continue today. "Children and teenagers must mobilize and demand that student loan debt be forgiven and that future generations of students leave college debt-free," he urges, among other planks in a youth platform for today. A compelling narrative that sheds light on a little-known aspect of the struggle for social justice.

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January 1, 2021

In 2020, it was young Black women who organized the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. They were following in the footsteps of young Black activists who have long been part of the civil rights movement, even as they have been overshadowed by the more famous leaders. In this latest history, Franklin (Distinguished Professor of History and Education, Univ. of California, Riverside) provides an authoritative history of the young activists who organized some of the largest protests during the civil rights era. Some of the stories are well known: the Birmingham Children's Crusade in 1963, the trial of the Scottsboro Nine, and the history of the Little Rock Nine. But those are only some of the stories in this book. Franklin provides a richer history of the young activists who marched in the South and provides an unflinching look at the brutality they faced. He also looks at the students who pushed for education reform and youth involvement in Black Power. It's an empowering history of the work young activists have done throughout the 20th century. VERDICT Franklin's history of student involvement in protest provides a rich historical perspective on the ongoing struggles for equality in the United States. Highly Recommended.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

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