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Brian Jones, A New Kind of Youth: Historically Black High Schools and Southern Student Activism, 1920–1975, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 619–620, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae243
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In A New Kind of Youth, Jon N. Hale explores how Black students in Black high schools played an underappreciated role as activists in the former Confederacy. This is a potent synthesis, woven from Hale's original research and skillful use of new secondary work, not just another civil rights movement history. Tracing the origins of Black high schools from Reconstruction through desegregation and its aftermath, Hale shows that the formidable triad that generated so much social change across the twentieth century—Black students in Black schools with Black educators—faced an interrelated assault by the 1970s.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Black students in historically Black high schools were exposed to a curriculum (albeit necessarily sometimes hidden or “fugitive”) that emphasized political awareness—the U.S. Constitution and the rights it guaranteed, for example, were frequent objects of study. In addition to recounting classroom and school-based stories, Hale describes organizations that activated Black youth on a larger scale, including the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, through which thousands of Black high school students became involved, even if still under the leadership of adults, in struggles against segregation and racist curricula, and for union rights and voting rights, among other issues.
