By Laurel White
A new article from a School of Education faculty member offers an in-depth analysis of how Black students in Louisiana used force to resist subordination during the civil rights and Black Power era. It also asserts the high value of such hyperlocal historical analyses to historians and educational researchers.
Walter Stern, associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, authored the article, which was published in a recent issue of Teachers College Record.
In general, Stern’s research focuses on intersections between racism, state action, and ordinary people’s lives in the 19th and 20th-century United States, with a focus on public schools and the metropolitan South.
In this latest publication, Stern examines 42 episodes in which Black students collectively used force to resist subordination between 1965 and 1974 in Louisiana secondary schools. The historical study drew upon eight collections at five archives, more than a dozen local and national newspapers, and author-conducted interviews.
Stern says the narrow geographic focus of this analysis provides a valuable perspective.
“In addition to demonstrating that American schools were central sites of Black rebellion during the civil rights and Black Power era, the article’s examination of 42 school-based conflicts illuminates the location-specific factors that shaped and differentiated how and why Black students used force to resist subordination,” Stern says.
As Stern points out in the article, one of the period’s larger national surveys of “student unrest” found that one in every 100 high schools reported “one or more ‘riots’ as protest activity” during the 1968–1969 school year. But Stern argues historians should not allow the widespread nature of unrest in the era to gloss over unique circumstances and action in individual communities across the South.
“Scholars should not mistake the ubiquity of Black students’ violent opposition to white supremacy as an indication that either subordination or resistance remained the same across time and space,” he wrote.
Stern contends the illumination of “hyperlocal contexts” is essential to educational researchers seeking to understand the racial politics of education.
Aside from asserting the value of this methodological perspective, the article establishes that the use of force was “a central — and unavoidable — feature of Black secondary students’ political engagement” at the time.
Stern argues previous historical accounts haven’t appropriately conveyed the students’ use of force, thereby obscuring the “the extent of Black secondary students’ political activity and the white supremacist violence that compelled it.”
Stern is also the author of “Race & Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764-1960,” which received the 2018 Williams Prize for the best book on Louisiana history.
Stern’s current book project explores the criminalization of Black youth during the desegregation era and the role that school officials, police, prosecutors, legislators, and judges played in that process. The project focuses on the case of Gary Tyler, a Black teenager who was imprisoned for nearly 42 years after being wrongfully convicted of fatally shooting a white student at their desegregating Louisiana high school in 1974. Stern received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend award to support the project.
The recent publication, “‘We Got to Fight for What We Want’: Black School Rebellions In Louisiana, 1965–1974,” is available here.