The Disenfranchisement of Tomorrow: Black Youth and the Struggle for Political Legibility During the Era of School Desegregation in Warren County, North Carolina, 1954-1971

Young people, particularly those who have yet to reach the legal voting age, often appear in both the greater political imaginary and academic research as accidental, underdeveloped, yet powerfully potent, “pre”-citizens. This conceptualization of childhood, rooted in Progressive Era movements, is pervasive in education philosophy that identifies the U.S. public school as a training ground for future participation in democracy. It is also grounded in historiographical and archival records where young people exist as silence despite their contributions and witness to historical movements, present and past. In the United States, Black youth – criminalized in the integrated public school and infantilized in history – occupy a specific, methodologically unconsidered, unthinkable, and illegible position regarding their political thought, action, and desires. In response to these issues, this dissertation fashions a historical and cultural study of school desegregation policy and youth political action. Utilizing primary archival sources, original oral histories, and secondary literature on social movement and education history, the study first, reveals the segregationist policy apparatus, actions, and rhetoric of the Warren County Board of Education and other North Carolina local and state officials during the county’s fifteen-year journey through desegregation following the decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Second, the study chronicles the largely untold story of the motives, methods, events, and outcomes of a Black youth-led struggle, coined The Soul Children’s Movement of 1970-1971, in the rural and predominately Black Warren County, North Carolina during the height of the Black Power era. Telling this lesser-known local history of these struggles for and against the equalization of educational opportunity and Black liberation contributes to the greater body of literature on Black youth movements for liberation and North Carolina-based movements for civil rights, youth resistance research, and contemporary issues of education policy, practice, and reform, including “school choice,” school vouchers, and school discipline, and resegregation. Ultimately, this study aims to shed light on persisting and unavoidable contradictions inherent in liberal democracy and citizenship vis-à-vis the political category of “child,” and interrogates the future of a democratic society where participation is foreclosed to one fifth of the nation’s population.