Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s by Kathryn Schumaker (review)

Reviewed by: Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s by Kathryn Schumaker Richard J. Stocking Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s. By Kathryn Schumaker. New York: New York University Press, 2019. vii + 288 pp. Hardcover 45. 00, paperback 25. 00. In Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s, historian Kathryn Schumaker uses a combination of social history and legal analysis to tell a well-researched and effectively written narrative of the public-school student protest movement from the 1960s through the mid-1980s. According to Schumaker, "This story is both national and intensely local" (8). Schumaker brilliantly demonstrates the local and nationwide aspects of the movement in five chapters. The first three deal with localized, grassroots student movements in Mississippi, in Denver, Colorado, and in Columbus, Ohio, while the final two "focus more on national developments and the way lawyers and judges talked about students' rights" (9). Within this narrative, Schumaker argues that high school students and their families played a vital role in reformulating their constitutional rights. However, as students' actions and subsequent court cases led to limited formulations of equal protection, privacy, due process, and free speech, courts often interpreted such freedoms narrowly. Schumaker's important work both narrates the nuanced development of students' rights and inspires readers in a number of ways. On the one hand, this narrative is deeply local. It tells of numerous people, especially students, who, though commonly referred to as "troublemakers, " stood up for their rights in public education. For example, the first chapter deals with the freedom-of-speech and Black freedom struggles in Mississippi. Multiple "troublemakers" stood up for their constitutional right to free speech. Concluding the first chapter, Schumaker argues that the cases that arose from these students' freedom struggle "laid the groundwork for future cases involving public school students and the Constitution even as they created a precedent that would limit the scope of students' free speech rights" (50). The second chapter examines segregation, integration, and equal protection in End Page 305 Denver public schools through a detailed analysis of that city's Chicano movement and civil rights movement. Individual students, groups of students, and their parents contested educational inequality throughout Denver. This resulted in Keyes v. School District #1, Denver (1973), a Supreme Court case addressing de facto segregation in Denver's public schools. While the court determined that there was segregation in the schools and that they needed to desegregate, it ruled "in a narrow way that constrained conceptions of educational equality" (90). Chapter 3 is about student discipline, civil rights, and due process in Columbus, Ohio. It traces Goss v. Lopez (1975) from its beginnings in the individual actions of students and parents who pushed for equal rights at public schools to a Supreme Court case that makes it a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment for a public school to suspend a student without a hearing. Each of these chapters demonstrates the tremendous efforts of "troublemakers" and the narrow rulings of the corresponding Supreme Court cases. In the second half of the book, Schumaker enlarges her scholarship with an analysis of national movements and their corresponding court cases. In Chapter 4, Schumaker discusses the Fourteenth Amendment and the idea of the right to education. Unfortunately, "In the 1970s, cases that relied upon the Fourteenth Amendment failed to expand the reach of constitutional arguments over equity in education beyond the issue of de jure segregation (169). The fifth chapter incorporates the landmark case Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) into the narrative. While many historians have written about Tinker and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), this book uses a mix of social history and legal analysis to chronicle "the development of students' constitutional rights, focusing on lawsuits that emerged out of the efforts of students to secure racial justice at school" (2). Throughout the United States, at different times and places, multiple students pushed for racial equality in public schools and acted to change their environment. Often school officials, law enforcement, and the media deemed negative the actions of such students and, as Schumaker argues, the court was often narrow in its rulings. This new narrative of. . .