New Kind of Youth

The story of activist youth in America is usually framed around the Vietnam War, the counterculture, and college campuses, focusing primarily on college students in the 1960s and 1970s. But a remarkably effective tradition of Black high school student activism in the civil rights era has gone understudied.

In 1951, students at R. R. Moton High School in rural Virginia led a student walkout and cont...