236: Teen Activists: A History of Youth Politics and Protest

BackStory

History, Education

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2019

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This month, youth around the globe participated in Youth Strike 4 Climate, coordinated demonstrations by school students who are demanding action by world leaders to prevent further climate change. So, in this episode, Joanne, Brian & Ed talk about the role young people have played in American politics. They’ll look at how the desegregation movement in Virginia was sparked in part by a 16-year-old girl, how young Americans made it okay to be independent voters and thinkers in the early centuries, a 1945 student walkout against integration, and the story of a young Lakota activist who travelled to Standing Rock when she was in high school.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of Backstory on the history of youth protest and activism
0:05.2	which was first published in April of 2018.
0:09.2	You can download thousands of other shows on our website, backstoryradio.org.
0:16.4	Major funding for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment
0:20.0	for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.
0:28.5	From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.
0:36.9	Welcome to Backstory, the American History Podcast.
0:40.2	I'm Brian Ballot.
0:41.8	I'm Joanne Freeman.
0:43.2	And I'm Ed Ayers.
0:44.6	If you're new to the podcast, Joanne, Ed, our colleague Nathan Connolly and I are all
0:49.5	historians.
0:51.1	Each week we explore the history of a topic that's been in the news.
0:55.4	Fromville, Virginia, it's just about an hour south of our studio here in Charlottesville.
0:59.9	And in 1951, Farmville became the epicenter of the desegregation movement in America.
1:05.6	But this movement didn't start in a church or a lunch counter.
1:09.6	It was started at a high school by a 16 year old girl.
1:17.8	Robert Russa Moton High School was built for African American students in Prince Edward
1:22.3	County.
1:23.5	It was one of only 12 black high schools in rural Virginia.
1:29.7	The school had no plumbing and was heated by wood stoves.
1:33.6	No gymnasium, athletic field or cafeteria.
	...

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