Student and Teacher Protests, and Repression of Protest by Educational Systems and the State
By hofeldtm
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In the 1930s, children of Jehovah's Witnesses had been expelled from school for refusing to salute the American flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance due to their beliefs. Officials threatened to send children to reformatories for "criminally inclined juveniles". Parents were being threatened with prosecution for "causing delinquency". In 1935, Carlton Nichols (9) was expelled and his father arrested in Lynn, Massachusetts. These events led to Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940).
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Minersville School District v. Gobitis was a decision by the Supreme Court involving the religious rights of public school students under the First Amendment. They ruled that public schools could compel students to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance despite students' religious objections. This led to increased persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in the US. The Court overruled this decision three years later, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943).
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West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette is a landmark decision by the US Supreme Court holding that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment protects students from being forced to salute the American flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance in public school. The Court's 6–3 decision, delivered by Justice Robert H. Jackson, is remembered for its forceful defense of free speech and constitutional rights generally as being placed "beyond the reach of majorities and officials".
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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The Court's unanimous decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and thus violate the 14th Amendment. However, the decision did not spell out any method for ending racial segregation in schools.
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Following Brown v. Board, the Little Rock Nine were a group of 9African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the "Little Rock Crisis," in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, and the AR Nt'l Guard. President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened, federalized the AR Nt'l Guard, and ordered them to enforce integration and guard the Little Rock Nine. -
The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests in Feb to July 1960 in North Carolina, which led to the Woolworth Company department store removing its policy of racial segregation. They are considered a catalyst to the subsequent sit-in movement, in which 70,000 people participated. The Greensboro Four were Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr and David Richmond, all Black students at North Carolina A&T who often met to discuss what they could do to oppose segregation. -
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was a significant student commitment to the 1960s civil rights movement. Emerging from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, they sought to organize direct-action challenges to civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC worked to register and mobilize Black voters in the Deep South. -
Dixon v. Alabama was a landmark 1961 US federal court decision ending "in loco parentis" policy for colleges and universities to discipline or expel students. Alabama State College, a then-segregated black college, expelled six students for unspecified reasons, presumably because of participation in civil rights demonstrations. The college, acting in loco parentis, expelled them without a hearing. The case held that a public college could not expel students without at least minimal due process. -
The Chicano Youth Leadership Conferences (CYLC), the first of which was held in 1963, were training grounds for student activists. At the conferences, students discussed inequalities between schools within the Los Angeles United School District, the need for bilingual and culturally relevant education, and the need for systemic reforms that would place students on the track to higher education.
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The Chester school protests were demonstrations from Nov 1963 through April 1964 in Pennsylvania. They focused on ending de facto segregation in Chester public schools, even after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The city deputized firemen and trash collectors and the state deployed state troopers to assist the police force. The demonstrations were marked by police brutality. Over 600 people were arrested over a two-month period of civil rights rallies, marches, pickets, boycotts and sit-ins. -
In 1965, seven students in the Des Moines Independent Community School District decided to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War, including siblings John F. Tinker (15), Mary Beth Tinker (13), and friend Christopher Eckhardt (16). The principals of the Des Moines schools received advance word of the act of protest and preemptively banned black armbands from school premises; when the students wore them anyway, they were suspended. -
The 1965 National Convention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was held in Akron, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover reported that it was attended by "practically every subversive organization in the US." The FBI (mainly through COINTELPRO) and other law enforcement were often exposed as having infiltrators in SDS. Hoover's general COINTELPRO directive was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities and leadership of the movements they infiltrated.
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In 1966, as part of the Annual Chicano Student Conference in LA County, a team of high school students discussed issues affecting Mexican Americans in their barrios and schools. Among the students at the conference were Vickie Castro, Jorge Licón, David Sanchez, Rachel Ochoa, and Moctesuma Esparza. These students formed the Young Chicanos for Community Action the same year (aka the YCCA, later called the Brown Berets). Some of the organizers would go on to organize the East LA Walkouts in 1968. -
The Mexican American Youth Organization was founded in San Antonio, Texas in 1967, and would later organize school walkouts in Texas. They employed the tactics of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later spurred the creation of the La Raza Unida Party.
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In September 1967, Sal Castro, Korean War veteran and teacher at Lincoln High School, met with the YCCA at their newly-founded Piranya Coffee House. The group decided to wear brown berets as a symbol of unity and resistance against discrimination, which gained them their modern name. Their agenda was to fight police harassment, inadequate public schools, inadequate health care, inadequate job opportunities, minority education issues, the lack of political representation, and the Vietnam War. -
SDS held a large demonstration against Dow Chemical Co. recruitment at UW Madison. The peaceful demonstrations turned to a sit-in that was violently dispersed by the Madison police and riot squad, resulting in many injuries and arrests. A mass rally and a student strike then closed the university for several days. A nationwide coordinated series of demonstrations against the draft ensued. 1967 saw an escalation in the militancy of campus protests and in police brutality against protesters.
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A 1968 survey by the American College Personnel Association found that nearly 1 in 5 college student protests demanded an end to racial discrimination on campus.
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At San Francisco State University, anti-racism activists in 1968 successfully pressured the administration to establish the country's first African American studies department.
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The East L.A. Walkouts or Chicano Blowouts were a series of protests by Chicano students against racism & unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District high schools. From March 1 to March 8, 1968, approximately 15,000 students walked out of classes from Woodrow Wilson, Garfield, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Belmont, Venice and Jefferson High Schools, demanding an equal, qualitative, and culturally relevant education. -
The student protesters participating in the East LA Walkouts were blocked by administrators barring doors to the outside, and helmeted police officers either jailed students or escorted them to their school principals for discipline. Student beatings were reported during the March 6 walkouts at Roosevelt and Belmont high schools. -
The day before organized walkouts began, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to local law enforcement to place top priority on "political intelligence work to prevent the development of nationalist movements in minority communities." For his part in organizing, Harry Gamboa Jr. was named "one of the hundred most dangerous and violent subversives in the United States" by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and his activities were deemed "anti-establishment, anti-white, and militant."
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The meeting between the Los Angeles Board of Education and the Educational Issues Coordinating Committee (a grassroots organization of Chicano students, faculty, parents, activists, and community members formed after the walkouts) took place. Over 1,200 community members attended the meeting, and the EICC got to present their list of 39 demands. The Board of Education denied the demands and the students walked out of the meeting. -
Thirteen Chicano walkout organizers were arrested for conspiracy to start the walkouts. Among those arrested were high school students, college students, organizers from the Brown Berets, editors of La Raza newspaper, and organizers from the United Chicano Students organization. Students and community members immediately organized a protest at the Hall of Justice to ask for their release. 12 of the 13 were released. Sal Castro, a teacher and key organizer, was held in detention the longest. -
June 2: Sal Castro, teacher and organizer, was released on bail but lost his teaching position at Lincoln High school due to the arrest. 2,000 people protested outside the police station to demand he get his teaching position back. September-October 1968: Students and community members organized round-the-clock sit-ins at the LA Board office until Sal Castro could be reinstated for his teaching position. The board eventually allowed Castro to resume his position. -
El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education was written in 1969 by the Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education (CCCHE). It was a blueprint for the inception of Chicana/o Studies programs in colleges and universities throughout the US. The Plan proposed a curriculum in Chicano studies, the role of community control in Chicano education, and the necessity of Chicano political independence. The document was the foundation for the Chicano student organization MEChA.
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Tinker v. Des Moines was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court that defined First Amendment rights of students in US public schools. The Tinker test, or "substantial disruption" test, is still used by courts today to decide whether a school's interest to prevent disruption infringes upon students' First Amendment rights. The Court observed, "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." -
In April 1969, Chicano college students held a nationwide conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara and wrote "El Plan de Santa Barbara". MEChA formed by the coalition of many smaller Chicano student movement organizations. Chapters first took root on California college campuses and then expanded to high schools and other states. They put political pressure on educational institutions. MEChA was fundamental in the adoption of Chicano Studies programs and departments in academia.
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The Chicano Moratorium was a movement of Chicano anti-war activists that built a coalition of Mexican-American groups to organize opposition to the Vietnam War. Led by local college activists and members of the Brown Berets, a group with roots in the high school student movement that staged the 1968 walkouts, the coalition held a march on August 29, 1970 in East LA that drew 300,000 demonstrators from around the nation, the largest anti-war action taken by any single ethnic group in the USA. -
The Chicano Moratorium March was reportedly watched by the LA FBI office, who later refused to release documentation of their activity.
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The peaceful march was broken up by armed local police with a helicopter dropping tear gas, who said that they had reports of a robbery. They kettled protesters and declared the gathering of thousands an illegal assembly. Protesters were injured, 150+ were arrested and four were killed: Gustav Montag, Lyn Ward, Angel Gilbert Diaz, and Rubén Salazar, news director of the local Spanish-language tv station and journalist for the LA Times known for his writings on civil rights and police brutality. -
The Chicano Moratorium march was organized by Chicano activists Ramsés Noriega and Rosalio Muñoz. Muñoz was the leader of the Chicano Moratorium Committee until Nov. 1970, when he was ousted by Eustacio (Frank) Martinez, a police informer and agent provocateur for the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Enforcement Division, who committed illegal acts to allow the police to raid the headquarters of the committee and make arrests. Muñoz had returned as co-chair of the Moratorium in February 1971.
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Los Seis de Boulder (The Boulder Six) were six Chicano activists and students killed in two car bombings, which remain unsolved; some activists suspected COLINTELPRO or police involvement. The students were active in the UMAS (United Mexican American Students) and MEChA groups at the University of Colorado Boulder, and were protesting the negative treatment of Mexican-American students at the time of their death. The event could have had a chilling effect on student activists. -
Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier was a decision by the Supreme Court concerning censorship of two student articles in a student newspaper in Missouri, 1983. The Court ruled that administrators could censor school-sponsored expression, such as curriculum-based student newspapers and assembly speeches, if censorship is "related to legitimate pedagogical concerns," and that public school student newspapers that have not been established as forums for expression are subject to a lower level of protection.
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UCLA students used activism to apply pressure and push the university to create a Chicano/a studies department.
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Tompkins v. Alabama State was a case involving affirmative action that was decided by a federal court in Montgomery. This was the first case filed by a Black student to challenge the existing race-based affirmative action policy at ASU. Four black applicants who'd been rejected for the white-only scholarship filed suit on equal protection grounds, and prevailed. "It's strange," said Tompkins. "You have a historically black institution giving scholarships to whites to remedy discrimination."
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SDS was revived in 2006 and organized numerous actions against the Iraq War, and opposed military action against Iran by the US. The Pace University chapter protested against a speech by Bill Clinton held at the University's New York City campus, prompting the university to hand over two students, Lauren Giaccone and Brian Kelly, to the United States Secret Service. After the threatened expulsion of the two protesters, they began a campaign that pressured the President of Pace to resign.
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Beginning in March and continuing into April and May 2006, SDS chapters across the country participated in a series of actions supporting immigrant rights. SDS chapters, including those at Brandeis, Connecticut College, and Harvard coordinated with large coalitions of students to strike and walk out of their classes on May Day.
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In March 2010, members of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee's chapter of SDS staged a protest outside the Chancellor's building. The event, designed to protest rising tuition costs, was met with a police presence. Police began using pepper spray, and arrested sixteen members of the protest, including both SDS members and allied organizations on campus through the Education Rights Campaign.
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Protesters across the country walked out of middle- and high school, college, and jobs to honor Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager killed by a police officer in Ferguson, MO on August 9, 2014. The protests came one week after a grad jury cleared the officer of any charges in Brown's death.
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High school students in San Antonio were suspended for 4 days during finals week for a school-sponsored fashion show in which they carried signs saying "Black Lives Matter," "We can't breathe," "Trans Lives Matter," and "I am Mike Brown, Marquise Jones, Aiyana Jones, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner" Administrators said the show was "not the proper place or forum," and that the students "broke policy" and "made a mockery of the school." The students were banned from important end-of-year accomplishments. -
Colin Kaepernick’s protest against racial injustice, police brutality and systematic oppression caused high school and college athletes across the US to emulate the NFL quarterback by taking a knee during the national anthem before their own games. Some of those student athletes faced threats from coaches or school administrators of game, team, or school suspensions, and some faced harassment or threats over their acts of protest. -
The anti-gun violence group Never Again MSD, formed and led by survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, held a rally Feb 17 in Ft Lauderdale, attended by hundreds of students. The rally was followed by other protests across the country. On Feb 19, students staged a "lie-in" outside the White House. Hundreds of students marched to Marjory Stoneman Douglas on Feb 20, and also demonstrated at Florida's Capitol. In Kansas, several hundred students protested on Feb 21.
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At Greenbrier High School in AK, 3 students elected to receive corporal punishment ("paddlings" on the thighs) for their participation in the Enough! National Walkout. This required parental consent and was done by school administrators, who had tried to get the students to stop protesting, then offered a choice between corporal punishment or 2 days of in-school suspension. Wylie Greer, one of the students, said, "They were merely doing their job as the school board and school policy dictated." -
The Enough! National School Walkout was planned by organizers of the Students' March in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting. Students left schools for 17 minutes (one minute for each person who died). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) supported the student's activism. An estimated 3,000 schools and nearly 1 million students participated in the protest. Thousands of students gathered in Washington, D.C. and observed 17 minutes of silence with their backs to the White House.
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The National School Walkout was a national student-led protest on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. The walkout was one of many protests against gun violence in the United States that erupted in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas mass shooting on February 14, 2018. The organizers of the walkout were met with criticism, opposition, and obstruction via absence policies from educators, school administrations, and government education bodies across the US. -
A report from the UCLA Civil Rights Project analyzed federal data from the 2015-16 school year for nearly every school district in the US. "The experiences of middle and high school students reveals profound disparities in terms of lost instructional time due to suspensions," said the lead researcher. Students of color are suspended and disciplined at far higher rates than white students. In some districts, more than 1 out of every 20 Black middle and high school students were arrested. -
A protest by a coalition of 30+ organizations (including teacher and labor unions and student groups) took place on Nov 4, the day after the 2020 election, before results were known. The protest demanded that all votes be counted in spite of Trump's demands to stop counting, protested his threats that he would not cede the election, and protested racism, police brutality, economic and systemic injustice. Protesters marched onto I-94 and were kettled and arrested by hundreds of armed officers. -
An Oklahoma school district repeatedly removed two Black elementary school students from their classrooms at Charles Evans Elementary and Will Rogers Elementary for wearing shirts that said "Black Lives Matter." The principal told them to turn the shirts inside out. Their mother was told the superintendent said political statements were not allowed in school, said the shirts created a disturbance, compared the BLM shirts to MAGA/Trump apparel, and said they would cause "anxiety and issues." -
Distribution of the yearbook at West Broward High School was suspended after students dedicated a section to Black Lives Matter, and some parents and teachers complained about the content. Sales of the yearbook were able to resume as the Broward County school district allowed distribution with a new note inserted stating that the views expressed were not sponsored by the district. A district statement said: “Broward County Public Schools supports and encourages students’ freedom of expression. -
A New Jersey valedictorian had his mic intentionally cut off and his notes crumpled on stage by the principal during his graduation speech, when he spoke about being LGBTQ+. The principal interrupted and told him to say the school-approved speech and nothing else. During the speech-writing process, all mentions of queerness and mental health were removed by the principal, and the student was told that graduation was not his “therapy session.” He finished giving his uncensored speech from memory.
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Teachers in more than 30 cities protested against new laws that would limit what they can say in the classroom about racism in the US. The Republican-backed laws were passed in Texas, Tennessee, Iowa, Idaho and Oklahoma, and have been proposed in other states. Many of the laws ban schools from discussing critical race theory or systemic racism. Some of the laws are even more broad, seeking to restrict lessons that focus on marginalized groups, equity, or privilege. -
Members of University of Minnesota Students for a Democratic Society disrupted a meeting of the Board of Regents to demand implementation of a Campus Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). “Students at the U of M deserve agency in regard to our so-called public safety,” said Emma Hjelle, who also called for “CPAC as a means to disarm, demilitarize and defund the UMPD.” As the protesters exited the meeting they chanted “What do we want? Community control! When do we want it? Now!”
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Students planned a protest against racism at Coosa High School in GA. An administrator preemptively announced over the intercom that the protest would not be allowed, that the police would be present, and that students would face punishment. Of the students who spoke with the administration to object, only Black student organizers were suspended. Parents were notified about the suspensions by sheriff's deputies. One parent said an officer pulled her over while driving to inform her.