Discover Top Posts Tagged with #school walkout

I doubt this will do very well, but this is a video of my high schools walk out to protest against ICE. It was such a lovely experience, we only had a few people cause much of a scene. People were very supportive and there were a lot of parents protecting us. (Shocking for our mainly conservative town)

There were a lot more people than this at the beginning, hundreds walked out of school, including a few teachers

#artemis rambles #fuck ice #fuck trump #Protest #school walkout #It was so much fun

The school walkout

Ts was peak, asshats that I know and nerds that I know were there

Also FUCK ICE ENTIRELY.

I got to see someone that is my moot here there too...

#fuck ice #fuck it #walkout #school walkout

I wanna ask my parents if I can do the school walkout protest but a lot could go wrong there and my mum is a control freak but it’ll be a huge life experience for meeeee:( LEMME GOOO

Should I just not tell them? Or ask and go, even if they say no?

I need to do something about ice. Oh holy shit this’ll probably be on the news

#anti ice #politics #walk out #school walkout #protest #walkout protest #school #SHOULD I GO?

As high school students across the U.S. embraced political activism, adults turned to the authorities to shield their sons and daughters fro

...On a spring day in March 1969, Laura Mackay Irwin sat in her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, and typed a letter she’d never imagined she would write. A former stenographer at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Irwin addressed her note to the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, as a plea for help. Irwin’s 17-year-old son, Basil Jr., had joined the Charlotte Student Union, a new organization demanding a more relevant high school curriculum and a greater voice in school decisions. The group’s aims were modest compared with similar organizations like the New York High School Student Union, a student rights group that called for “an immediate end to the draft” and “community control of the schools and every other community facility.” To Irwin, however, her son’s activism didn’t signal ordinary teenage rebellion. She sensed something far more sinister.... ...By 1969, the high school students rights movement had fully taken shape. Inspired by the fight for civil rights and ongoing protests against the Vietnam War, teenagers like Basil organized their own political groups to assert their constitutional right to free speech and claim a greater say in the operation of their schools. These students’ ambitious organizing, plus the published materials they circulated, raised eyebrows. Parents like Irwin believed such efforts seemed suspiciously advanced for teenagers. Surely, they reasoned, someone older was directing it all. Irwin believed the union had lured bright students like her son under the guise of a discussion group where attendees would converse about civic affairs, art and music. But once the students had convened, she claimed, radicals took over...

...Hoover replied one week later. He thanked Irwin for sharing her concerns and assured her that he understood the “problems confronting our students today.” The director then forwarded Irwin’s letter to the Charlotte field office, alongside a memo instructing staff to “develop [her] as a potential security informant.” The Irwins’ family drama mirrored many others’ at the time. Across the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, teenagers became active participants, and even leaders, in the civil rights, Black Power, Chicano, antiwar and women’s liberation movements. But when they carried that activism into their schools, they frequently collided with administrators determined to keep partisan politics off campus. These confrontations played out in walkouts, boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, petition drives and lawsuits. What many mistakenly believed had begun on college campuses now seemed to be seeping into the nation’s high schools. (In truth, the two movements unfolded concurrently, with some teenagers’ efforts predating those of their college-age counterparts.) “High School Unrest Rises, Alarming U.S. Educators,” the New York Times warned in May 1969. A year later, the Los Angeles Times sounded the alarm again: “High School Race Turmoil—a Frightening Growth.” Law enforcement took notice of these teen activists. The FBI—along with local police departments and military intelligence units—orchestrated surveillance campaigns that targeted high schoolers.... ...But what fascinated some terrified others. For many white, middle- and upper-middle-class Americans, high school activism represented chaos. The FBI, on the other hand, symbolized order.

As I learned while researching my forthcoming book, High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America, parents like Irwin offered their assistance to authorities or asked for help in saving their sons and daughters. Some adults wrote letters to the bureau. Others shared their fears over the phone. At least one visited an FBI field office in person. Sometimes, parents’ correspondence alerted the bureau to groups not already on its radar. Nearly all of these adults were convinced that “outside agitators” like the national Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were the ones pulling the strings to indoctrinate their children. Media coverage of college-age SDS members infiltrating high schools only strengthened these convictions. The reality, however, was more nuanced, with many student groups actively seeking support from older activists. “We didn’t have the resources to organize, publish newspapers or work media [on our own],” John Eklund, a former youth activist from Milwaukee, told me. “There was really nothing nefarious about this, and if anything, we welcomed being taken seriously by these adults.” Since 2014, I have filed nearly 2,000 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking classified records on FBI surveillance operations targeting high school students in American cities, suburbs and rural areas. Tellingly, none of the 233 surviving records I obtained through these requests discuss nonwhite parents reaching out to the bureau. This total is unsurprising. Many communities of color had fraught relationships with law enforcement during the tumultuous 1960s. And the FBI has played a longstanding role in defending America’s status quo. Many white parents of the era had a different opinion of the bureau. They’d come of age listening to crime dramas crackling over the radio, reading comic books and newspaper articles about dashing detectives, and watching films that cast the FBI as an incorruptible crime-fighting organization. Now, as adults, they feared that the villainous forces of their youth had returned to target their own children. Only Hoover’s men, they believed, could keep their teenagers safe....

...The bureau also sought to shape family dynamics in ways that might curb teenage activism. Between 1968 and 1970, the FBI targeted high school students directly through a counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO. In December 1968, Hoover learned that police had detained a 17-year-old girl during a demonstration against the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C. Agents were struck by the obscenity-laced message on her hat, which protested the Vietnam War draft. The text also included the words “resistance” and “anarchy,” as well as a reference to the New York High School Student Union. Sensing an opportunity, Hoover authorized the New York field office to send an anonymous letter to the girl’s mother. Written by an agent posing as a concerned fellow parent, the letter offered a stark warning. If the woman allowed her daughter “to continue her pathetic association with her ‘Yippie’ friends, she will surely end [up] where my poor daughter is now—under psychiatric care.” No surviving records indicate that the bureau learned how, or even if, the mother responded. Nonetheless, its agents continued to suggest sending anonymous letters and placing phone calls to parents in hopes of undermining teenagers’ political activities.

...When I have shared these documents with former youth activists, their reactions have run the gamut. Some were stunned. Others found the bureau’s efforts shameful or absurd. “I laughed out loud when I read that the FBI had a file on Rhode Island High School Students for Peace—the thought that grown men … were worried about us,” novelist Anne Finger recalled. In other cases, the revelations reopened deep wounds. Barbara Auten, a former activist from Albuquerque, concluded that surveillance of her group likely reached the U.S. military. She believes that the military sent her father on an additional tour of duty in Vietnam as punishment. Parents were not the only ones who assisted the bureau in spying on teen activists. Administrators, classmates and private citizens often cooperated as well. They forwarded materials they’d confiscated and turned the FBI into an unlikely repository of long-overlooked documents. But unlike mothers and fathers, they rarely expressed concerns about teenagers’ wellbeing. They tended to view student activists as pawns or nuisances. Parents, in contrast, believed they were defending their children’s innocence. In their eyes, every other institution had failed to protect their children. The FBI offered their last and best line of defense.