Teens: The Forgotten Face of Black History

During the month of February, you’re bound to learn about the struggles and triumphs of African Americans like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in their fight to achieve equal rights for themselves and others. While Parks and King were visionary leaders of the movement, schools and textbooks often leave out an equally relevant piece of black history: the struggles and accomplishments of teens. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, teens were an integral part of the civil rights movement, and today, teens continue to be a strong force in the fight for justice and equality.

A Teen Takes a Seat

Before Rosa Parks, there was 15-year-old Claudette Colvin from Montgomery, AL. In March 1955, this black teen refused to give up her seat in the middle of the bus to a white passenger. Her words? “I do not have to get up. I paid my fare…It’s my constitutional right.” As a result, she was handcuffed and hauled off to jail.

Some activists believed this incident would spark a larger attack on segregated seating, but Colvin’s actions were largely lost to history — possibly because the 15-year-old was pregnant and unmarried at the time of her protest. Nine months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and became a household name.

She Closed Down Her School

Claudette Colvin isn’t the only activist teen who’s been left out of the early civil rights section of history books. Even if you don’t know much about black history, you’ve probably read about Thurgood Marshall and his role in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision. But what do you know about Barbara Johns?

In 1951, while attending Moton High School in Farmville, VA, Johns, 16, became disgusted with the inequities between white schools and black schools. She wasn’t the first person to get angry, though. Many parents and activists had tried to improve schools for their children but had made no headway. Sick and tired of the injustice, Johns took one long look at her school — the deteriorating building, the tarpaper shacks used to hold the overflow of students — and decided if anything would be done, it would be up to the students to make it happen.

With the help of friends, Johns took over her school. She gathered all of the students in the auditorium and demanded that teachers and staff leave. When they refused, students escorted them out of the building. The students then staged a strike on the school grounds, refusing to return to the school building until it was in better condition.

Johns contacted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and asked for help in filing a lawsuit to receive funding that would make her school equal to the white students’. The NAACP decided to sue for an integrated school, rather than just for a black school that was comparable to the white schools — striking down the notion that separate could be equal. A month later, the NAACP filed suit in federal court on behalf of 117 students in Johns’ school, becoming one of the five cases of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that would end segregation in schools.

I’ll Eat Where I Please

Years after Johns and her schoolmates took a stand to make their school better, four other students opted to take a seat.

In February 1960, Ezell Blair Jr. (who now goes by the name Jibreel Khazan), Franklin Eugene McCain, Joseph Alfred McNeil, and David Leinail Richmond — four black freshmen from North Carolina A & T in Greensboro — marched into a downtown Woolworth store and sat at the whites-only lunch counter. Despite the fact that a black waitress refused to serve them, saying, “Fellows like you make our race look bad,” the teens sat there all day and promised to return the next morning.

Surprisingly, their sit-down protest against segregated lunch counters made the local news, and by the next morning, 19 other students joined the four freshmen. The day after that, a total of 85 students parked themselves at the Woolworth counter. They never were served, and they endured taunting by crowds of white people who had gathered.

But by April 1960, sit-ins continued to sweep the South, eventually shutting down more than 70 stores of 13 white-owned corporations for nearly three months. The students decided to start an organization to keep things flowing, and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC continued to stage mass sit-ins until lunch counters in more than 150 cities were desegregated.

Remembering Their Efforts

While you may not learn about Claudette Colvin or Barbara Johns or the four Greensboro freshmen in history class, it’s important to remember these teens and the impact their actions have had on your life. They paved the way for you to be able to attend an integrated school, which made it easier to make friends with people of different races and cultures. Because of them, you have a choice where you eat and where you sit on the bus or train. So during this month of celebrating black history, remember the vital role that teens played in shaping the past, and think about how you can carve out your place in the history books of tomorrow.