Documenting the Contributions of Children and Teenagers to the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the “Children’s March” in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, students at the University of California, Riverside, TRIO Mentoring Program were asked in Winter 2012 to volunteer to participate in a research project to document children and young people’s activities during the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. While actions of the young people in Birmingham were captured in film footage as they marched peacefully and were attacked by policeman with billy clubs, water hoses, and dogs, it was also the case that children and teenagers were involved in civil rights campaigns throughout the country, and they organized numerous demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, and protests for racial justice. Fourteen TRIO students signed up for “Independent Study” and read and reported on books that touched on those events. They used the reference work, My Soul Is a Witness: A Chronology of the Civil Rights Era, 1954–1965 (2000) by Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, to trace civil rights activism in U.S. cities and towns and identified locations where children and teenagers played significant roles and reported their findings. UC Riverside students enrolled in Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 in the “Research Seminar—Children and Young People in the Civil Rights Movement” began gathering information on children and young people’s contributions to social activism in locations identified by the TRIO students. The goal was to gather newspaper articles, magazine stories, photographs, cartoons, and other primary sources that would be used in an exhibit to be mounted at the UC Riverside Orbach Library beginning in May 2013 as part of the half century commemorations of the Children’s March. While much has been researched and written on the roles of college and university students in civil rights activities, there has been little focus on elementary and high school students’ activism.