"Youngest Combatants" as pdf file.

Youngest Combatants of the Second Civil War:
Black Children on the Front Lines of Public School Desegregation

Peter Wallenstein

In early 1965, eight-year-old Sheyann Webb and nine-year-old Rachel West were among the many African Americans in the volunteer army that battled, in its nonviolent way, for black adults’ voting rights in Selma, Alabama. The violence visited upon that nonviolent army proved instrumental in generating massive support, in northern public opinion and in the U.S. Congress, for passage later that year of the Voting Rights Act. The events of 1965 punctuated a decade of change in traditional southern ways. Much remained undone, and the Civil Rights Movement persisted, but by then Jim Crow was very much on the defensive. The legal and constitutional basis of segregation and disfranchisement was coming to an end.

Much has been said and written of the roles of college-age black youth in the sit-ins of the 1960s, in desegregating higher education, and in pushing for the right to vote. Even younger were the black southerners without whom no elementary or secondary school in the region could have been desegregated. This essay explores the experiences of those youngest warriors for progressive change on the racial front during the decade and more after the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that the Fourteenth amendment did not permit a state or local government to segregate its public schools. Black participants in desegregation themselves have referred to their engagement in a war, as when one of the Little Rock Nine from 1957–1958 terms her memoir Warriors Don’t Cry.

This essay revisits the actions—and the memories of those times—of a small sample of people who, as elementary or high school students, participated in the events of the 1950s and 1960s that brought to an end the absolute segregation that characterized public schooling in the South before 1954. In North Carolina, Josephine Boyd switched in 1957 from all-black Dudley High School to all-white Greensboro High School, where she completed her senior year and graduated in 1958, the first black graduate of a white high school in that state. In Virginia, Betty Kilby won a federal court ruling that led her to being in the cohort of black students to enroll in early 1958 in the white high school (the only high school) in Warren County, and she tells of her often harrowing experiences between then and her graduation in 1963. In September 1965, in a Deep South variant of the desegregation story, three members of the Carter family enrolled in the white elementary school, and four others in the white high school, in Sunflower County, Mississippi. This essay’s final section recounts the march toward desegregation, through three iterations, in Hyde County, North Carolina, beginning on a token basis in 1965, changing in 1968 in a way designed to obliterate the black schools, and finally—after a student boycott of the schools that lasted an entire year—reaching a version of racial integration that the black community as well as the white community could find effective and acceptable. Much of the time in these pages, the young people tell their own stories, as they responded to new possibilities and challenges in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education.