Troublemakers

Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s

Kathryn Schumaker

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781479875139
• eBook ISBN: 9781479801138
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A powerful history of student protests and student rights during the desegregation era

In the late 1960s, protests led by students roiled high schools across the country. As school desegregation finally took place on a wide scale, students of color were particularly vocal in contesting the racial discrimination they saw in school policies and practices. And yet, these young people had no legal right to express dissent at school. It was not until 1969 that the Supreme Court would recognize the First Amendment rights of students in the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines case.

A series of students' rights lawsuits in the desegregation era challenged everything from school curricula to disciplinary policies. But in casting students as "troublemakers" or as "culturally deficient," school authorities and other experts persuaded the courts to set limits on rights protections that made students of color disproportionately vulnerable to suspension and expulsion.

Troublemakers traces the history of black and Chicano student protests from small-town Mississippi to metropolitan Denver and beyond, showcasing the stories of individual protesters and demonstrating how their actions contributed to the eventual recognition of the constitutional rights of all students. Offering a fresh interpretation of this pivotal era, Troublemakers shows that when black and Chicano teenagers challenged racial discrimination in American public schools, they helped remake American constitutional law and establish protections of free speech, due process, equal protection, and privacy for students.

1

The Right to Free Speech

Students and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi

In October 1964, a black teenager stepped up to the witness stand to offer her testimony in a Mississippi courtroom. Her name was Canzetta Burnside, and she was fifteen years old. The judge had to instruct her to speak up so that the court reporter could hear her testimony. The school district’s lawyer spoke to the young woman condescendingly, calling Burnside by her first name despite the protestations of her attorney. Just moments before, the lawyer had prodded Burnside’s mother about her older daughter Martha’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, making a pointed dig at the family’s reputation.1 Even in the courtroom, it was difficult for black men and women to demand respect from white people in Mississippi. Another student offering testimony, Neva Louise English, was just fourteen years old. Both students attended the segregated high school for black students in Philadelphia, Mississippi.2 Burnside, English, and dozens of other students had been suspended from school two weeks earlier for wearing “freedom buttons” that expressed support for voter registration.3 They were in court to protest the suspensions and claim the protection of the First Amendment’s free speech clause. Burnside and English insisted that the buttons, which were inscribed with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) slogan “One Man, One Vote,” mattered a great deal to the students. Her lawyer prodded English: What did the buttons represent, and why did she and so many other students insist on wearing them to school, risking suspension and possible expulsion? “The reason we were wearing them is for our rights. . . . Our rights to speech and to do the things we would like to do,” English responded. Upon further questioning, she added, “And to register and vote without being beat up and killed.”4

In the autumn of 1964, when the judge initially heard the button case, the decade-old Brown v. Board of Education decision had not yet been brought to bear upon Mississippi’s segregated system of education. Canzetta Burnside’s principal was black, as were all of the teachers at her school. Concerned for his livelihood, the principal swiftly disciplined the students for their silent display of support for voter registration. Those who challenged Jim Crow did so at their own peril, as anyone present in the courtroom when Canzetta Burnside and Neva Louise English testified would know. English’s reference to people being “beat up and killed” for attempting to register to vote invoked the horrific crime that attracted the national spotlight to Philadelphia months earlier: the kidnapping and murder of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner. This chapter explores the two button cases that emerged from Mississippi schools in the months after Freedom Summer, which marked an important turning point in the development of students’ free speech rights. Yet the button cases were about far more than the First Amendment. The protests that spurred litigation and the harsh responses of school administrators revealed internal conflicts over the extent of administrators’ authority and the provision of separate and unequal education to the state’s black students. The treatment of black students in public schools and the inferior education they received became a focal point of protest as teenagers emerged as historical actors, inspired by the activism of others but bearing grievances and agendas of their own.

Education and Freedom in Mississippi

The button cases emerged from a historical moment in which young people were politicized, with many participating in direct action protests during Freedom Summer, a voter registration and education campaign launched in June 1964 by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). The council coordinated the efforts of several civil rights organizations, making it possible for hundreds of black and white college students from outside the Deep South to travel to Mississippi to join local people in challenging the legitimacy and legality of Jim Crow.

Freedom Summer was certainly not the first effort to register voters and fight white supremacy in Mississippi, and by the time SNCC arrived, youth organizing was already a tradition in the state. While the threat of violence or the loss of a job kept many African Americans reluctant to join civil rights organizations and publicize their support in the process, many young people joined the anti-white supremacy efforts spearheaded by adults. In the late 1950s, intrepid local teenagers organized National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Youth Councils in several Mississippi cities.5 Their activism, like that of Canzetta Burnside and Neva Louise English, often resulted in consequences at school. Black administrators in segregated schools straddled two worlds. They served black students and families while being perpetually conscious of the control whites held over their jobs and livelihoods.6 And so, when black students brought their protests to school, black administrators responded by punishing them with suspensions or expulsions. In Meridian, Youth Council members were suspended by school administrators for wearing badges to school stating “U.S. Supreme Court Decision, May 17, 1954,” in reference to Brown v. Board of Education and in protest of continuing racial segregation in the city’s schools.7

In the spring of 1961, the Freedom Riders rolled across state lines to test the enforcement of federal lawsuits that struck down racial segregation in interstate bus terminals, garnering a bloody response from local police officers and the Ku Klux Klan.8 A few months after the Freedom Rides, a group of SNCC workers began voter registration work in the southwestern city of McComb, where violence and threats forced the NAACP chapter to go underground during the increase in white violence after Brown.9 During the voter registration drive, organizers in McComb were arrested and brutalized by police, and in late September, a white Mississippi state legislator shot and killed local black NAACP member Herbert Lee, bringing a violent end to SNCC’s work.10

Amid the effort to register voters in McComb before Lee’s murder, more than 100 high school students staged a walkout at Burgland High School to demonstrate solidarity for their classmates Brenda Travis and Ike Lewis, who had been arrested and thrown in jail for attempting to desegregate the local Greyhound station.11 When the school’s principal expelled Travis and Lewis, Burgland students left the school and marched down to city hall. While the sole white SNCC worker was beaten by angry whites, police arrested more than 100 of the student protesters as well as the SNCC workers. After her expulsion, Travis was declared delinquent by a local judge and sent to a reformatory school, where she remained until May 1962.12 The students’ protests divided local black adults, and some furious parents publicly whipped their children once they were released from jail.13 Students were required to sign a pledge vowing they would not participate in any direct action protests in order to return to school; those who refused were expelled and attended an alternative school, Nonviolent High. The school offered courses taught by SNCC organizers, including Robert Moses, a former teacher at New York City’s Horace Mann School.14 The use of alternative schools as forums for teaching black history in tandem with raising the political consciousness of young people was one that flowered during Freedom Summer and was later used in other instances when young people were excluded from school for their protest activity.15

In 1963, the sit-in movement came to Woolworth’s in Jackson when three black students and their white teacher from Tougaloo College sat at the whites-only lunch counter as whites jeered, dumped ketchup on them, and physically assaulted the peaceful protesters.16 Black students in Jackson likewise put their bodies on the line during a walkout in 1963. Gene Young testified in 1964 before Congress that he had been a part of the peaceful protest, during which policemen brutalized children as they marched to the state capitol. They were rounded up, and because there were too many students and too few jail cells, the children were forced into animal pens at the state fairgrounds where, Young testified, they were fed food cooked in garbage bins and stirred with mops.17 Months before Freedom Summer began, thousands of public school students in Canton staged a walkout and day-long boycott of their schools in protest of the poor conditions.18

These teenagers joined college-aged men and women in a generation that was more politically active than any other since the 1930s.19 In planning the Mississippi Project, COFO organizers identified education and voting rights as interlocking parts of the challenge to white supremacy. The voter registration drive of Freedom Summer culminated with the establishment of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the legitimacy of the segregationist Southern delegation from the state at the August 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.20 It also contributed to a wave of national support for meaningful voting reforms that crested with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In addition to its the voter registration work, COFO founded “freedom schools,” which mostly catered to children and teenagers. Just as the voter registration efforts necessitated teaching black Mississippians to ace the literacy tests required for voter registration, the freedom schools sought to create an analogous role as the incubators of future voters and activists by allowing students to study black history and the political systems of the state. Historians have shown how transformative the experience of attending a freedom school was for many black children and teenagers.21 Although most college-aged volunteers stayed only for the muggy months of July and August, Freedom Summer’s impact rippled outward in the following months, rocking other facets of Mississippi life long after it ended—especially public education.

The ideas undergirding the freedom schools and their role in undermining racial subordination were embodied by SNCC organizer Charles Cobb’s initial pitch, which he circulated during winter of 1963–1964. The prospectus emphasized the basic inequities of Mississippi’s public education system and how it was “burdened with virtually a complete lack of academic freedom.” Cobb concluded that the state and its “classrooms remain intellectual wastelands.”22 With a focus on young people, COFO could cultivate a new generation of leaders in the Black Freedom Struggle who would carry on movement work long after Freedom Summer ended. From the very beginning, Cobb conceived of the summer freedom schools as being deeply connected to and potentially transformative of the everyday experiences of black children in Mississippi’s segregated public schools. One of the main goals was to meet “the responsibility to fill an intellectual and creative vacuum in the lives of young Negro Mississippians, and to get them to articulate their own desires, demands and questions.” In sum, as Cobb put it, “More students need to stand up in classrooms around the state and ask their teachers a real question.”23

Cobb proposed a program in which high school-aged students would spend only part of their time in the classroom; the rest would be out on the streets and in organizing meetings with COFO volunteers.24 Students who attended freedom schools would learn to help potential voters prepare for registration and get their first taste of direct action campaigns. The council’s recruiting letter for college volunteers described the purpose of freedom schools as to “provide politically emerging communities with new young leadership, and constitute a real attack on the presently stifling system of education in the state.” Ideally, then, “the basis will have been laid for a cadre of student leadership around the state of Mississippi committed to critical thinking and social action.”25 The freedom schools would constitute one part of Freedom Summer’s “program of social and political education,” opening the eyes of children and teenagers to their own ability to challenge the state’s racial caste system.26

Figure 1.1. Freedom school students listen to folksinger Pete Seeger at the Palmers Crossing Community Center, 1964, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Source: Herbert Randall Freedom Summer Photographs, box 6, folder 4, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.

The freedom schools did not all live up to the lofty expectations organizers had for them; many of the teachers were underprepared (and themselves uneducated in black history), and the donated books were often either too few or did not cover a useful subject.27 But a rigid curriculum did not fit the idea of freedom schools, and years later, many freedom school participants recalled the sessions as crucial moments of political awakening.28 One freedom school teacher in Hattiesburg observed that the students did not learn in a “point-by-point, organized, ‘logical’ manner” but that they instead “learn[ed] by talking, by conversation, by rambling around and beating the nearby bushes.”29 The schools were less focused on rigid lesson plans and learning objectives and more concerned with teaching students to acquire political consciousness—to see the inadequacy of their schools, the leadership of their state, the economic subjugation of their families as strange. Charles Cobb described the education black Mississippians received in the public schools as “parochial,” and, in contrast, described the mission of the freedom schools as centered on introducing students to new people and new ideas, regardless of the subject matter. “You would get some kind of payoff without thinking—just from the fact you had a student from Yale talking to a Mississippi ninth grader about Asia,” Cobb later recalled.30 The council workers wanted to use the freedom schools to nurture the political consciousness of young people and prime them for later activism.

Within his original prospectus, Cobb floated the idea of a statewide school boycott to occur after the summer ended, which would be spearheaded by student leaders who had been cultivated in freedom schools.31 Students and volunteers in Hattiesburg discussed planning a walkout to support the registration of their teachers as voters.32 But taking direct action to school could result in disciplinary action by school administrators. In Holmes County, just north of Jackson and Yazoo City, a SNCC fieldworker reported that a rumor circulated around town that any students who attended freedom schoo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1. The Right to Free Speech: Students and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi
• 2. The Right to Equal Protection: Segregation and Inequality in the Denver Public Schools
• 3. The Right to Due Process: Student Discipline and Civil Rights in Columbus, Ohio
• 4. A Right to Equal Education: The Fourteenth Amendment and American Schools
• 5. Tinker’s Troubled Legacy: Discipline, Disorder, and Race in the Schools, 1968–1985
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author