A New Kind of Youth: Historically Black High Schools and Southern Student Activism, 1920–1975 by Jon N. Hale (review)

Reviewed by: A New Kind of Youth: Historically Black High Schools and Southern Student Activism, 1920–1975 by Jon N. Hale Rachel Klepper A New Kind of Youth: Historically Black High Schools and Southern Student Activism, 1920–1975. By Jon N. Hale. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xii + 336 pp. Hardcover 99. 00, paperback 27. 95, e-book 22. 99. In A New Kind of Youth, Jon N. Hale skillfully intertwines the history of education with the history of youth and childhood to offer new insight into the End Page 337 role of teenagers in the Southern freedom struggle. The book is grounded in careful analysis of both topics' historiographies, and its power comes from the integration of two clearly related, though often distant, areas of scholarship. The introduction provides an overview of the racialized and gendered construction of childhood and youth, describing how Black children were denied the protections of childhood and how they claimed and sustained agency amid the violence of white supremacy. It also traces the history and significance of Black high schools in the South since Reconstruction, noting their growth in the context of Jim Crow, which required active resistance from teachers and principals and whose "second curriculum" provided a foundation for students' political consciousness. Hale explicitly centers youth ages fourteen to eighteen, who are not always distinguished from college-age youth, featured more prominently in civil rights movement narratives. Organized chronologically, the five chapters effectively document young people's distinct and evolving participation in the long civil rights movement. Hale identifies key turning points during which youth and adults acted on the potential for youth organizing in new ways, such as creating the NAACP's youth councils in the 1930s, the Double V Campaign, the 1950s push for school desegregation, the Freedom Summer campaign, and the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade. With sources that include conference records, student newspapers, and oral histories, the book details youth participation and leadership in campaigns, school walkouts, bus boycotts, and sit-ins. The final chapter, covering 1969 to 1975, shifts the narrative away from growing youth involvement in direct action to focus on the repression and backlash that followed. Through state and federal policies, governments and school boards exercised punitive control over youth, resulting in attacks on students, teachers, and school resources that "abetted the rise of mass incarceration" (189). Here, a harmful vision of youth as threats emerges as the flipside to youth as activists. Segregationists' efforts to cast protesting youth as dangerous permitted their continued violence, but this did not stop the youth struggle for "full inclusion and justice" (218). Each chapter documents examples of activism in high schools, in organizations such as the NAACP and the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and on the front lines of direct action. At the heart of the book is the assertion that, for Black Southerners, protest movements were educative spaces, and educational spaces were sites of protest. Involvement in organizational activities taught young people community organizing, coalition building, and other topics that informed their lives, education, and careers. At school, students learned from Black teachers, although those teachers were often forced to remain distant End Page 338 from protest or face retribution. Hale cites Jarvis Givens' Fugitive Pedagogy to illustrate teachers' and schools' integral character of resistance. Educational injustice was especially relevant to young people, so school boycotts or efforts to desegregate were often the first place youth became involved. Hale highlights a duality of youth influence: youth as individuals with their own strategy and potential for action, and youth as an idea that drove adults to make decisions to protect youth or employ their help. Adult expectations for youth sometimes inhibited activism, prioritizing respectability or safety in opposition to direct action. While carving out spaces in adult-supervised institutions, youth organized in their own environment, like at the Chicken Shack, a popular youth hangout in Baton Rouge. By laying out the intertwined institutions that contributed to their political education, Hale presents a particularly holistic sense of the breadth of teens' lives and the spaces they inhabited. A New Kind of Youth excels in its presentation of abundant and varied youth experiences. Hale brings to the forefront. . .