When you think of “Youth Movements” in America, you most often think of Vietnam, where students on college campuses throughout the country helped change the nation’s attitude toward the war.
You may also think of the sexual revolution and the hippies who so famously flocked by the thousands to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and helped usher in, for better or worse, a cultural shift in American society.
But there was an earlier movement, one often organized, led and energized by young Americans that we don’t generally think of as a “Youth Movement.”
It is better known as the Civil Rights Movement.
The importance of those young people, says Tougaloo College history professor Dr. Daphne Chamberlain, cannot be overstated.
“What you will find is that in almost every significant event in the Civil Rights movement, young people were there, often in the middle of it,” Chamberlain said. “They weren’t just spectators, either. They were active participants. We know about Emmett Till and those four little girls who were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, of course, but there were so many other kids whose names we don’t know who were out there on the front lines.”
For Chamberlain, 36, telling the stories of those young people has been the focus of her academic career.
Thursday night, she spoke on the subject “‘Full-Fledged Agitators’: Youth Protest in Civil Rights Era in Mississippi” as part of the Gordy Honors College Forum Series at Mississippi University for Women.
“In many ways, kids were able to do things their parents could not or would not do,” said Chamberlain, a Columbus native. “Depending on their age, they may not have had a grasp of all the issues, but when the movement came, they responded.
“You have to remember that for the adults, the Civil Rights movement was considered a dangerous thing,” she said. “Black pastors and leaders were often wary of what was happening. The stakes were high. It wasn’t just the violence that often resulted from the marches and protests. You could lose your job, your home if you participated in the movement.
“But kids didn’t have all those fears. They were not bound by those kinds of worries. Certainly, many of the kids who were in the movement were the children of parents who were active. But for many others, it was something they did on their own, often without the approval of their parents, who worried about their safety.”
During the course of the last few years, Chamberlain’s expertise on the topic has made her a regular speaker on the lecture circuit as 50th-anniversary commemorations of key moments in the Civil Rights movement have been observed. Mississippi, so often the ground zero for those moments, is a rich field for researchers and historians such as Chamberlain.
“It’s been a great resource,” Chamberlain said. “I’ve met so many people who were a part of that history and that’s been important. It’s been 50 years or more since many of these events and we are losing so many of those people.”
While we often think of the college students who joined The Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee in connection with the Civil Rights movement, Chamberlain said her research has shown that children as young as 5 were arrested for participating in the movements various marches and events.
“I think of people I’ve met like Gene Young, who was 12 years old and living in Jackson at that time,” Chamberlain said. “Like a lot of kids who would be a part of the movement, he didn’t really know or understand it well. He told me at that time, all he was worried about was which little league team he was going to be on.
“But when a school walkout was called, he walked out. He said he walked out mainly because he was more afraid of what his older brothers would say if he didn’t walk out. But to him, that was the first step, and he was an active part of the movement from that moment.
“When I was a young girl, I would see the documentaries about the Civil Rights demonstrations,” Chamberlain said. “What I didn’t realize then was that when I saw those images of those police dogs and water canons being used on those people, many, many of them were kids.
“All these years later, it’s hard to imagine what the movement would have been like without those kids.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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