San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Books: How Black youths shaped the civil rights movement.
While pictures of young people doing sitins, picketing, facing mobs of angry racists and walking into recently desegregated schools with police protection are some of the most iconic images of the civil rights movement, the names associated with it, recognized as its leading forces and written about the most, all belong to adults like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X.
In “The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement,” V.P. Franklin, a renowned UC Riverside professor, author and historian, shifts the emphasis away from these figures to shine a light on Black youths and their allies. These young people are responsible for some of the most important events of the early 1960s, for keeping the eye of the media on the struggles of African Americans and for getting the movement as we know it off the ground.
According to Franklin, what has not been emphasized in earlier studies is “the participation of high school students in sitins and civil rights marches from the beginning of the protests.” This book changes that. Franklin successfully fills in the gaps in knowledge regarding the many young African Americans across the country who stood up to racism, hatred, police oppression and physical violence to make a difference and allows them, in many cases, to tell their story in their own voices. Franklin showcases the immense power, resilience and unbreakable spirit shown by young activists, some as young as 6 years old, by drawing on newspaper articles, history books, interviews, autobiographies, academic journals and other sources.
“The Young Crusaders” covers various decades and offers brief chronicles of important marches, groups, sitins, protests and meetings that took place all over the country. In this regard, the book’s only flaw is that it packs too much — too many names, places, dates, incidents and quotes — into its 236 pages, which makes it hard to keep up. The author never stops for long on a single event, and there is no space for the history of everything and everyone he mentions. The breakneck speed and fragmented nature of the writing demand careful, attentive reading, but Franklin always returns to the message at the core of his narrative:
“(C)hildren and teenagers were on the front lines of civil rights activism before and after the launching of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, considered by many historians the beginning of the Blackled social movement that brought about the end of apartheid — legal racial segregation — in the United States.”
The book, which includes eight pages of blackandwhite photos and notes that offer an outstanding bibliography, celebrates the young people who became activists and changed the country for getting into “good trouble,” as the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis put it. While history is important, this message is what makes the book memorable, and it’s the element that brings it to the present and strongly ties it to the Black Lives Matter movement.