As Aaron Fountain Jr. was working on his book, High School Students Unite!, he discovered a little-known partnership of sorts. He found that, during the Civil Rights era of protest and reform, parents were reaching out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and requesting help. Namely, please spy on my civically active kid.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:10] This [00:00:10] is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy. So about a week ago, I'm doing my thing, my thing, being scouring the internet for truths about the United States. [00:00:20] Because there is always, always something I may have missed. Something that has just happened. Something that has just come to light. And I found this [00:00:30] article by an historian named Doctor Aaron Fountain Jr.
Aaron Fountain: [00:00:34] Oh, so my name is Aaron Fountain, and I am a historian of 20th century American [00:00:40] history and recently published a book on high school student activism in the 1960s and 70s.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:47] Aaron's book is called High School Students Unite [00:00:50] Teen Activism, Education reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America. And that article of his. It was titled Newly [00:01:00] declassified records suggest parents collaborated with the FBI to spy on their rebellious teens during the 1960s. So [00:01:10] yeah, I had to talk to Aaron. So [00:01:20] Aaron Fountain discovered that the FBI was [00:01:30] surveilling high school students in the 1960s, and that parents would sometimes be the ones tipping the FBI off. And [00:01:40] this was something that not many people knew, including some of the very students who were being surveilled. So first, I wanted to know why [00:01:50] Aaron was focusing on high school students and their activism in the 1960s to begin with.
Aaron Fountain: [00:01:57] Oh, well, let me just [00:02:00] say I was not an activist in high school because I attended eight different schools in three states, so not really possible. However, it really started by accident. I came across [00:02:10] a book by political scientist Richard Ellis called To the Pledge, and in several pages in one chapter, he talks about junior high and high school students who sat during the Pledge of Allegiance [00:02:20] as a form of political protest in the 1960s and 70s. And it made me just wonder, well, what were the stories behind those court cases? So during that process, I saw [00:02:30] so many passing references to high school students involved in civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activism. So maybe ask, well, how did the Vietnam War affect students, teachers, and administrators? And [00:02:40] I wrote a paper on the San Francisco Bay area on that very topic. And yeah, doing my doctoral dissertation on high school student activism in the San Francisco Bay area. But the book, however [00:02:50] that I publish is nationwide.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:52] And in terms of what is actually going on in the country at this time, I know that the 1960s or the civil rights era can be this [00:03:00] kind of catch all term for, you know, social, political, global unrest and activism and change. But, Erin, can you just paint us a picture of how this period [00:03:10] of time precipitated high school civic action?
Aaron Fountain: [00:03:14] Well, in 1960s, you have a record number of teenagers enrolled in secondary school. I know high [00:03:20] school is now like a universal experience. But prior to the 1960s, less than half of the adult population in the United States had a high school diploma. It was not as important [00:03:30] to get a good paying job. However, after World War Two, receiving a secondary education became much more important in our understandings of modern citizenship [00:03:40] and to be a productive member in society. But also coming out, you know, you have the civil rights movement. Then you get the burgeoning, um, anti-Vietnam War movement, and it's teenagers [00:03:50] who are participating in both movements, and they bring these Partizan politics to campus, and they start to clash with school administrators who were determined to keep those type of activities [00:04:00] off campus. Not to upset parents. Not to upset the school board because you know you want to keep your job if you're an administrator. And it's just this constant clash going back and forth [00:04:10] between whether students have constitutional rights to engage in political activism, have free speech in the campus newspaper, etc., and school administrators [00:04:20] who look at students more paternalistic and parents who argue that his school just as democratic as a household. You don't punish your kid and put him on trial. Just, you [00:04:30] know, you do whatever your parents tell you. So that's what comes out. And over time, you get this very unique brand of high school student radicalism. Um, and there's [00:04:40] two moving parts of this, um, ideology. The first one is that high school students constitute an oppressed group analogous to poor people, minorities and women. And second is [00:04:50] that you couldn't truly reform society unless you first reform the high schools.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:55] Did you get the sense that these students were aware that they were a member of an oppressed [00:05:00] group.
Aaron Fountain: [00:05:00] Oh, yeah. When you read the underground newspapers, leaflets, fliers, they're calling their schools, prisons and concentration camps. They refer to them as like, [00:05:10] factories that just churn out future soldiers to go into the Vietnam War. And then you wonder, like, well, are we citizens? Do we have, like, free speech, the right to assemble? Um, [00:05:20] freedom of the press. And this occurs gradually. It's not like an overnight realization.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:29] And I know that college [00:05:30] campus activism was a major media focus in the civil rights era. Were high school students coming into this on their own, or was this something they [00:05:40] were, you know, borrowing from their older counterparts?
Aaron Fountain: [00:05:43] So high school student activism then and now is hyper local. Um, students are largely responding to issues that [00:05:50] affect their everyday lives. And when you think about controversies that occur in a school, it usually doesn't spill out beyond like a school board or individual campus. It remains confined to that. [00:06:00] So because they're hyperlocal, they're not seen as national stories. However, by 1968, and especially in 69 and 70, there was a lot of reports on student [00:06:10] uprisings in high school. And there was like, um, credibility behind that. There was definitely a record number of like student walkouts, boycotts, protests and sit ins or whatever. After [00:06:20] Doctor King's assassination in 1968, students start to form more independent student organizations, and underground newspapers have a stronger network. By 1968, however, [00:06:30] it was not a spillover effect. Now, I should say high school students are not adversarial to college students. They actually work alongside them. But there's a lot of distrust. [00:06:40] So for a 16 year old, somebody who is 20 year old is like old. In fact, some of the people I interviewed, they told me like, yeah, the organizer, they were like 2021. But as teenagers, we [00:06:50] thought they were just old guys. So I mean, teenagers, they definitely align with adults, but for the most part, they seek assistance from them. They're not letting them run [00:07:00] their affairs. So as teenagers, they don't have access to like, media and printing press, so they have to go to them for that type of help. High school student activism. When it reaches [00:07:10] the national attention, it's already a full blown movement. In fact, teenagers learn that there is a movement for mending from high schools. About a year or two before the national press does.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:22] You [00:07:20] know, it is hard enough for practiced adults to organize and find consensus and then do something with that in terms [00:07:30] of civic action. How did high school students, who maybe did not yet have any kind of experience with that, figure out how to do [00:07:40] it?
Aaron Fountain: [00:07:40] Oh, I'll be honest, there are just as many as adults are. There's a lot of ideological divisions. I mean, not to mention there are kids. So as a person who I interviewed told me that, [00:07:50] you know, there was jealousy, there was romance. You like, you wanted to so and so, like me or not, there's like immaturity and some of the males and some independent student groups were quite sexist [00:08:00] to their female counterparts. So it's all really messy at the end of the day. But what brings them together is that they all agree that, okay, we have to reform the school. So like, [00:08:10] you can generally get a consensus amongst students to like reform dress code like students, regardless of whether they were political or not, just did not like the fact that girls couldn't wear pants and boys had to keep their hair at [00:08:20] a certain length, and the bans against, um, afros. So, you know, no student group or underground newspaper or protest gets like the majority of support, but they do [00:08:30] get enough support to trigger a pretty vigorous reaction from people in power.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:35] Oh, yeah. And we're going to get to that. Um, but in terms of what actually, [00:08:40] you know, got these students, that reaction, what were they activating around, you know, was it about national issues, you know, the Vietnam War, civil rights, or [00:08:50] was this about what was going on in their own schools?
Aaron Fountain: [00:08:54] So it's actually a mix of both. So one thing that was pretty common is that students would ask their school principals [00:09:00] to allow, like an anti-war speaker, to come and speak at the school to balance out a visit from a military recruiter. And they had various successes and shortcomings when it came [00:09:10] to that. Um, so but you see these like, you know, there's national issues, but again, it's it's in this local context and the same thing with like, you know, black Power, a lot of there's a lot of similarities [00:09:20] between a lot of black student protests where they're asking for like, you know, black teachers, black administrators, black history courses to be taught in schools, and, um, soul food. However, while the [00:09:30] overlap, there also are local concerns too. So they want like, you know, doors on the bathroom stalls, which is a very basic, uh, concern. Um, you [00:09:40] know, they ask for, like, police officers to be removed from campus in many urban school districts. This is when you start to see school administrators become much more reliant on law enforcement to handle [00:09:50] everyday disciplinary matters. Or they'll ask for like access to a stadium that's adjacent to the school, so it's similar in a lot. A lot of these protests [00:10:00] are quite similar. They're reacting to a lot of national stuff, but it's always shaped by what's ever going on locally. So it's a combination of both that they're reacting to.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:11] Okay. [00:10:10] Law enforcement in schools. Why was it that administrators were turning to this outside force to navigate what [00:10:20] was going on in their classrooms and hallways?
Aaron Fountain: [00:10:23] That's the main point in my book where I talk about, like, the expansion of student rights coincided with the modernization of school security. So school police. There's [00:10:30] a history going back to 19, the mid 1950s, when Tucson, Arizona, was the first school district to experiment with a school resource officer. But by the 1960s, especially [00:10:40] with urban uprisings, um, you have a lot of protests that are coming out in high school, a lot of racial protests. So you have desegregation and in desegregated schools or schools that were newly integrated, you get a lot of [00:10:50] racial violence. And you also in those schools, you get a lot of protests coming from black students, Latino students, Asian students, and white students as well Native American students too. So in response, [00:11:00] with all the social unrest coming from the high school, you get a lot of pressure from parents, from teachers, school administrators, as well as the local newspapers and whatever [00:11:10] respective city demanding that order needs to be maintained in high school. So school administrators, they don't initially bring cops into school. They try like hall [00:11:20] monitors and parents patrol, or they lock the doors on campus at key, quote unquote, outside agitators out. And increasingly, what you start to see is that police officers in the department [00:11:30] in many cities start to patrol schools, but also you get undercover cops to the NYPD, and the New Orleans Police Department were quite open about the fact that they [00:11:40] had young officers with cherubic appearances masquerading themselves as seniors who would attend school and eventually investigate student activists. [00:11:50]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:50] I can only imagine what it might feel like to learn that the person who you thought was a friend or an ally is actually an officer in disguise [00:12:00] investigating you. Who were these students? You know, I know your book tells the stories [00:12:10] of so many individuals in this era. Can you share a story about someone who really stood out to you?
Aaron Fountain: [00:12:16] Oh, yeah. One of my favorite characters in my book is Bruce [00:12:20] Triggs, a kid from New York City, All-American Boy Scout. You know, he's from a Jewish background. World War Two is quite celebrated in his household. [00:12:30] Um, and, you know, he joins the Boy Scouts and he believes at a very young age that the United States is, uh, you know, a moral example, a good force for the world, and that he could do no [00:12:40] wrong. And what happens is that his family moves to Queens, and he attends a different school where he meets students who smoke marijuana, who are involved in the antiwar movement. [00:12:50] And he eventually dates a girl who's a girl in high school who was an antiwar activist. She introduced to him Che Guevara, and he asked like, hey, he's a communist, isn't he? She's like, you bet [00:13:00] he is. And his head, he's like, this is just too much. I can't support a communist. Are you crazy? And what happens is that he eventually goes to an anti-war conference where a schism occurs. [00:13:10] And normally, as he recalls, most people would be turned off, but he was just blown away. But the turning point is when he attends the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and when the riot breaks [00:13:20] out, he finds himself, he gets punched in the face by a police officer. And from, well, he was already kind of gradually shifting. That was the catalyst. And then he comes back to New York as a full [00:13:30] blown radical and helped find a New York high school student union, which leads to a pretty, you know, chaotic year in New York City schools in 1968 and 1969. So [00:13:40] that's definitely one of my favorite characters to write about. The person who goes from being a very all American Boy Scout to a political radical.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:54] All [00:13:50] right. So we got to talk about the FBI because kids like Bruce Triggs were clearly setting [00:14:00] the adults in the room on edge. And we're going to get to that after a quick break. We're [00:14:20] back. You're listening to Civics 101. And Civics 101, by the way, is a nonprofit podcast. [00:14:30] And maybe one day we should make an episode that gets into the specifics of what a nonprofit really is. But the main point here is that we are not, you know, making a profit for [00:14:40] ourselves or for anyone else. Whatever money we receive is used to pay our journalists and pay the people who keep New Hampshire Public radio functioning, and make sure we have [00:14:50] the basic gear to record people's voices and share those voices with the public. Our whole reason for existing is to share with you what is happening [00:15:00] in the world now, and what happened in the world in the past, so that you can better understand your world. So if you have the ability to contribute to that effort, please consider making a donation at civics101podcast.org. [00:15:10] You can just click the red bar at the top of the homepage to do that. And just a shout out to the many, many listeners who have already done that who make sure that we [00:15:20] can do this work every day. You know, you are proof positive that the world is not all about profit. It is also about people, education and civic empowerment. All [00:15:30] right, back to the show. I am talking with Erin Fountain, junior historian [00:15:40] and author of High School Students Unite! Teen activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America. Erin put in an immense [00:15:50] amount of work to figure out what was going on re students and the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the postwar era, during the 60s and the 70s. [00:16:00] And given the fact that I had never heard of the FBI surveilling high school students before, I wanted to know what first tipped Aaron [00:16:10] off.
Aaron Fountain: [00:16:11] Oh, yeah. Well, it came across when I was going through an underground newspaper from Palo Alto, California, and there was a group called the United Student Movement. And in [00:16:20] the interview, the two people who were interviewed or several I don't I forget how many they kind of bragged about being spied on by the FBI as teenagers, like, we're bad. You know what? So I submitted [00:16:30] a FOIA request on that very group, was told nothing existed. So when I got to graduate school, I wrote a seminar paper on a New York high school student union, which is actually in a [00:16:40] book. And a former member gave me about 80 some pages of memorabilia. And two of those pages were the groups FBI file. My jaw immediately dropped because I'm like, oh, [00:16:50] when I long suspected is finally confirmed. So I went to a professor who gave me a FOIA template, and I submitted one on the New York High School Student Union, but realized I was too late because [00:17:00] all the files were destroyed in 79 2010. In April 2014, I had just submitted that request August of that very year. So realizing [00:17:10] that, okay, the National Archives and Records Administration's actively destroy documents, let me submit Fourier requests on all the groups I know about. I immediately got positive results from [00:17:20] Milwaukee, Minnesota, El Paso, Texas, including the United Student Movement. When I told when I was originally told, nothing existed. And, you know, over time, it wasn't like a eureka moment. I would start to expand, [00:17:30] and I submitted FOI requests on high school, underground newspapers and schools that had civil unrest or racial violence. And I started to look at suburban and rural areas. And [00:17:40] over the course of ten years, I found well over 370 high school groups under some form of surveillance or counterintelligence operation. Now, if you count the amount of students [00:17:50] who as young as 14, who had an FBI file as well as police departments, the US military and state legislators who spied on teenagers. Then that number is well over 600. [00:18:00] But even that's an undercount.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:08] And, Erin, I know that you have submitted [00:18:10] over 2000 Freedom of Information Act requests, FOIA requests in pursuit of this information, meaning essentially, that this was not common knowledge, right? It was not something [00:18:20] that everyone was aware of. What has been the reaction so far when you have told people that the FBI was surveilling [00:18:30] them?
Aaron Fountain: [00:18:31] Oh, it has varied actually. Some people say, wow, that's kind of pathetic. Like the FBI was spying on teenagers. Others are not surprised [00:18:40] because they were around at the time. I remember one one comment I saw was somebody like, I knew it when I shared an FBI file, because one thing about the FBI file, I [00:18:50] remember some school administrators, parents and students who are informants. I remember one person's like, you know, I can see school administrators and even students serving as informants, but the parents. Wow, [00:19:00] that is quite shocking. In fact, most people I interviewed, everybody was shocked that parents were informants. They weren't as surprised as school administrators were. And some were suspicious whether students were informants. [00:19:10] But for the longest time, I only had one example, so I thought it was an anomaly. It wasn't until like eight years later that I came across multiple files showing me like, oh, this was actually more widespread [00:19:20] than I had assumed.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:21] The notion, the notion of a parent, you know, ratting you out to Herbert Hoover. Right. Or expressing concern to the FBI [00:19:30] is really kind of beyond my comprehension. I think if my mother had said to me, I'm calling the FBI on you when I was in high school, I would have said like, ha ha, yeah, good luck with [00:19:40] that. You know, um, could you give us a sense of how or why a parent would feel that calling the FBI, writing a letter to the FBI was [00:19:50] a remotely reasonable response when a kid started to get activated, right? Started to to speak out or organize around what was going on in their school or what was going on [00:20:00] in their country.
Aaron Fountain: [00:20:01] Yeah, that's a good question. So nationwide, when high school student activism reached its peak, the large consensus amongst people was that this was a master [00:20:10] plan by some outside agitators who these outside agitators were. It changed over time. In the mid 1960s, they were just communists. And by 1968 and to early 1970, [00:20:20] they were SDS, the Black Panther or whatever local political group that existed in whatever locale. And parents, interestingly, they start contacting [00:20:30] the FBI as early as 1965 when students are organizing against the Vietnam War. They're mostly white, middle or upper middle class parents. But it's also important to understand what the [00:20:40] FBI symbolized in the 1960s. Popular culture lionized it going back to 1930s. I mean, you could read about the FBI in comic books and [00:20:50] listen to them on radio stations, on television and films and all of them. This still exists to the present day. I recently watched The Wolf of Wall Street. It was a scene that exemplifies [00:21:00] the FBI as being an incorruptible, crime fighting organization.
Archival: [00:21:04] What is it that you think that we did or do? I don't get it. Well, Jordan, I can't [00:21:10] discuss an ongoing investigation. No, I get that. No, I understand.
Aaron Fountain: [00:21:14] And so within that context, parents, unsurprisingly, a minority parents start [00:21:20] to contact the FBI. They either wrote letters to them, sometimes directly to J. Edgar Hoover, or they made phone calls. Any time at night. Sometime at midnight. In fact, [00:21:30] I recently got an FBI file. This is not in a book from Madison, Wisconsin, and a father. He serves as an informant in a very interesting way. His boy talks openly about a [00:21:40] political group he's involved in in Madison, Wisconsin, called the High School Student for Social Justice. And he listens to him. And what the boy doesn't know is that he relays all that information to the FBI. [00:21:50] And the FBI agrees to only contact the father when he's at work. So the son doesn't suspect anything and they all express concerns. It wasn't that they're children they thought were [00:22:00] committing like, criminal acts. They just thought they were all being indoctrinated. Um, or sometimes they thought children that weren't of their own were being indoctrinated by some quote unquote, [00:22:10] sinister force. So it's really this, this concern. I mean, I know in our contemporary eyes it's seen as obscene. Like, why would you do that to your own kid? But for many, [00:22:20] the parents, they just thought that every institution had failed to keep their kids safe. And the FBI was their last and best resource.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:28] And when you say surveillance, [00:22:30] what does that practically mean? Are we talking FBI agents hanging out in some unmarked vehicle outside of the school with binoculars? [00:22:40] Like, what does surveillance actually mean when it comes to the FBI and high school kids?
Aaron Fountain: [00:22:46] Oh, that's a good question. It's a variety of things. They will like, you know, cut out [00:22:50] newspaper clippings and, I, you know, clip them onto some, some poster or as a paper. Police officers, parents, students and administrators would confiscate. Underground newspapers and other published [00:23:00] materials and forward them to the FBI. Which is why in the book, I call the FBI Unintentional Archivist, because a. Lot of documents they collect I've never seen anywhere else. One agent in [00:23:10] Los Angeles masqueraded himself as a graduate student from UCLA, writing a paper about underground newspapers. So he calls a kid who's now a college student, Antioch [00:23:20] College. And the kid just tells him everything about the underground newspaper, and he has no idea that the person on the other line is an FBI agent.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:28] What is it about [00:23:30] the actions of these teenagers that makes adults around them act in this way?
Aaron Fountain: [00:23:38] Yeah, it's it's really just the the extent [00:23:40] of their organizing. I mean, when I say these independent student groups, they weren't just like some of them were groups with like three people, but for the most part, they were like citywide or metropolitan wide groups. They would have members [00:23:50] from across public and private schools across the city and the surrounding suburbs, and he created underground newspapers, which were really sophisticated. They would have, like [00:24:00] a photographer, a field correspondent, who, if there was a high school having an uprising, they would actually send their correspondent there and interview students. So, so much like written material, [00:24:10] so much sophisticated organizing that it's believed that there are just no way in the world teenagers on their own are doing all of this, and somebody has to be pulling the strings. I've [00:24:20] seen letters to the editors where they'll say, like, this is just way too sophisticated for our kids to write.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:25] Yeah. And to your point, right, this is the beginning of high school as the standard for American [00:24:30] teenagers. It is a new world when you have this many young people being brought together in the same place, finding their voice through both education and through community. Can you [00:24:40] talk a little bit about what these disparate movements actually ended up accomplishing? What came out of this student activism?
Aaron Fountain: [00:24:49] Yeah, [00:24:50] it's short term and long term goals. So short term a lot of schools would definitely did hire like black teachers and got, um, you know, black and Latino principals. [00:25:00] And they started teaching black history courses, which I think is important when we think about black history, that that came because of the demands from high school students themselves, wasn't just given to them. So the combination [00:25:10] of very hyper local, like for example, Berkeley High School, till this day it still has a black studies department, and it was the first one in the nation to like sex education. Or they stopped kicking girls out of [00:25:20] school because they were pregnant, which was a widespread practice in the 1960s. Of course, not the father, only the the girl who got pregnant. One thing to the school district, they passed high school bill of rights. [00:25:30] Um, Bill so these Bill of rights bills kind of really embedded the notion of student rights in the school. So like empowered, like, um, school councils gave more freedom to like, student [00:25:40] press, gave students due process rights so they can actually contest, um, suspensions and expulsions without it being arbitrarily decided. So there's the hyper local initiative, but [00:25:50] the long standing one is definitely the notion that students have constitutional rights in schools. That has to be respected so long as they don't cause a disruption. It still gets debated and whatnot. But prior [00:26:00] to 1969, that was not a notion that most people could comprehend. Whether a minor had constitutional rights.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:24] We're [00:26:20] back. You're listening to Civics 101. I am talking with Aaron Fountain, junior historian and [00:26:30] author of High School Students Unite. Teen activism, Education reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America. What [00:26:40] about high school students today? Do you think that they can have the same impact on their schools and their communities?
Aaron Fountain: [00:26:45] No. Students today still will like, you know, support like labor disputes. I remember thinking [00:26:50] Madison, Wisconsin. There was a janitor who was the father of a kid at the school, and he lost his job after a dispute with his students protested, and he got his job back. So there are [00:27:00] things like that. Um, and students today still protest against book bans, or I've seen incidents in them making like freedom schools, um, challenging what's taught in the curriculum. [00:27:10] I do think it's important to, to understand that not all students are on the left. There definitely are students on the right, and they are free to believe whatever they want. So any protest I'm talking about, [00:27:20] there's always a a counter demonstration or a countermeasure to whatever students are trying to achieve. And sometimes students on the right are successful as well and getting their [00:27:30] demands.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:30] Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking about the fact that even today we are seeing students organize. We are seeing them stage school walkouts in order to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement. [00:27:40]
Archival: [00:27:40] The fear that our peers, um, go through every single day. It has to be vocalized. And what we're doing right now is vocalizing that fear that we've been hearing for months.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:49] And I wonder, [00:27:50] you know, just thinking about the title of your book, High School Students Unite. Exclamation point. Would you say that you are pro student activism?
Aaron Fountain: [00:27:59] Oh, yeah, [00:28:00] I'm pro people. Um, I quote Diane Nash, who made a statement that I wholeheartedly agree that one of the issues with the civil rights movement is that it's often viewed [00:28:10] as a Doctor King movement and not as a people movement. And when it's viewed as a people movement, people can sit around and ask instead of saying, hey, can we have another Doctor King [00:28:20] like figure come. They can just sit and ask, like, what can I do? So yeah, I'm a big proponent of student activism. Many of the people I talk about in the book, it really shaped their careers a lot and wanted to academia, [00:28:30] some of them became journalists. Interestingly, one person started an underground newspaper and became a journalist in the future. Um, you know, became scientists and elected [00:28:40] officials and labor organizers and a lot of that activism that they continue into their adulthood, even if they don't see it as activism, it's all rooted into their political precociousness [00:28:50] as a kid. So no. And these kids are interested in politics and issues that affect their everyday lives, regardless of whether they're on the left or the right. I think, you know, students [00:29:00] from both sides should get active.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:06] Is there anything else that you want to highlight from your book? Maybe something that [00:29:10] you don't get asked to talk about very often?
Aaron Fountain: [00:29:12] I will say one thing I wish people asked me more about was the fact of how not just national, but international high school student activism was in [00:29:20] 1960s and 70s. Um, in this book, I have a list that I worked on for over ten years to list ones. It includes the name, over 500 independent student organizations, and [00:29:30] the names of over 1000 high school underground newspapers. And I did that because when I decided to focus on the San Francisco Bay area in grad school, I was kind of getting a little annoyed when people [00:29:40] say, oh, yeah, of course. Or like, oh yeah, that would never occur where I lived though. So yeah, when I made the list, it includes the names of groups and papers from all 50 [00:29:50] states, including D.C. and Puerto Rico. Um, but I do not have, like, the international aspect. And I should for listeners to know that high school student activism in this period occurred on [00:30:00] all six continents. From the literature, we know that it occurred in Guatemala, Panama, England, France, Italy, Finland, Ethiopia, South Africa, India, Australia, New [00:30:10] Zealand, Canada, and also students to, to a small extent actually knew that they were part of an international protest movement fomenting from secondary schools. And there was [00:30:20] correspondence between American teenagers and teenagers who lived in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And American and Canadian teenagers actually met one another in person. [00:30:30]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:30] Okay, so how were these students communicating across borders? What were they saying to each other?
Aaron Fountain: [00:30:36] Oh, so this is the high school underground press. Um, teenagers in the [00:30:40] United States created a national syndicate as a network to connect all the high school underground newspapers. So pretty pretty much the syndicates, a newspaper exchange. So let's say where I live is like [00:30:50] the office of whatever group. So I have 20 subscribers from across the nation. They each send me five copies of their papers. I send each copy to every subscriber. Maybe keep like, you know, [00:31:00] two to myself and send the others to like national publications and they will share articles. And this, this just accumulated over time to the point that they had about 700 newspapers. [00:31:10] And when you go to the archives at Temple University, you see these letters that students are writing to them from across the United States, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, [00:31:20] um, and asking them, how do I create an underground newspaper? This is what hey, can you send me papers? Because I want to see what American students are writing about. Um, it's a unique, uh, [00:31:30] correspondence. The guy who donated that collection, who I interviewed in the book, called it the social media of the age. Unfortunately, some of those records got destroyed. He kept 50 of the best, he told [00:31:40] me, but it got destroyed in a flood. Yeah, this happens a lot. But the ones that exist, it's just, uh, it's a phenomenal collection, just to see what students were, [00:31:50] um, discussing and what issues they had. Some of them talk about like police and FBI harassment, uh, of their of their papers and others would talk about, like, you know, this is a current lawsuit, [00:32:00] um, that we're going for. So it's a, yeah, fascinating collection that they had over time. But again, it took like five years for them to build that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:32:24] Well, [00:32:20] for those who want to know more about what Aaron learned, you can find high school students unite teen activism, [00:32:30] education reform and FBI surveillance in postwar America wherever books are sold. And stay tuned for what Aaron is working on right now. It's another book covering teenage action during the Vietnam [00:32:40] War, but this time he is going global. Aaron is looking at the roles that Canada, Australia, even New Zealand played and how high school students from across the world responded [00:32:50] to the ways their nations got involved in a war that inspired millions of people to get organized and speak out. This [00:33:00] episode was produced by me. Hannah McCarthy, Nick Capodice is my co-host. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Marina Henke is our producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic [00:33:10] Sound. If you got something out of this episode, if you learned something, if you're taking what you learned and doing something with it in your world, your community, consider leaving us a review on [00:33:20] whatever platform you are listening to this on. Help us get the word out that we are here for you and only you, the public. Because this [00:33:30] is, after all, a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.