THE YOUNG CRUSADERS

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.