December 1, 2015, marked the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus in 1955. This incident sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the mid-20th century civil rights movement. A century before Parks' act of resistance, African American schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings was…

Background/Context: Legal scholars have cited the Fifth Circuit's ruling in Dixon v. Alabama State Board of Education (1961) as the beginning of a revolution for students' rights that ended the in loco parentis relationship between colleges and their students. But little has been written about the students' activism that led to this seminal case.…

This paper focuses on how shifting conceptions of youth underpinned young people's activism in the 1950s and 1960s. This paper specifically examines conceptions of youth as it changed throughout the twentieth century. G. Stanley Hall articulated a distinct notion of "adolescence" in the early twentieth century. But the "Scottsboro…

This biography for younger readers describes the life of Rosa Parks, the Alabama black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a segregated bus helped establish the civil rights movement. The book is introduced by an overview of the movement by Andrew Young and a timeline indicating major historical events from 1954 through 1968. Highlights in…