The importance of youth participation has been so integral to the civil rights movement that it has largely been invisible as a coherent thesis by academics. Historians talk about the Scottsboro boys, Emmett Till and the Little Rock Nine, and virtually any other civil rights example, yet the overarching theory of youth as a propaganda weapon has not been singularly examined until now. Schweinitz has produced a theory that encompasses youth as underpinning (and eventually undermining) the entire civil rights debate in the twentieth century, claiming that “scholars have missed the ways that civil rights groups specifically used ideas about childhood to solicit support for the movement” (142).

Civil rights campaigners took the concept of an idealized American childhood as a cornerstone of their struggle against racial segregation, claiming that “childhood was a sacred state that needed to be protected and that racial discrimination obviously violated” (82), and, in a Cold War setting, this had extra ideological contention. Schools were laboratories and nurseries for citizenship, “teaching not only what democracy is but also to ‘love it, and to live it’” (83). The ramifications of this included white children being taught to be good, integrated American citizens, not simply referring to African American children pursuing their rights.

Schweinitz contends that violence elicited against African American children and appeals to adults in their roles as parents made the civil rights struggle meaningful to many people and created a moral narrative for the movement. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which legally desegregated education in the USA, exemplifies this strategy clearly and also its downside. Civil rights lawyers, using evidence from developing social-science research, argued “the rights of childhood” should be extended “to all young Americans” (87), and that an “inferiority complex is installed in the Negro children” through apartheid (88). However, this sympathy for children limited the support garnered for civil rights as many “white Americans were willing to come to the aid of black children … [but] they were only willing to do so if it did not affect white children too much, as the controversies surrounding busing and affirmative action revealed” (145), and the sympathy did not fully extend to African American adults.

Schweinitz's thesis is pertinent to current academic thinking as a fresh perspective in which to examine the civil rights struggle. It allows historians to reexamine how ideas of childhood and youth advanced the movement by directly pursuing white American values, yet equally shows us the paradox of such an approach, that by emulating white society with its inequalities, the cause itself was to be severely curtailed.