The word troublemaker in Kathryn Schumaker's Troublemakers: Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s carries many associations. It is the favored term of Jim Crow-era whites like those in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who juxtapose “good Negroes,” that is, those who stayed in “their place,” with so-called “troublemakers” whose protests upset the racial order (p. 18). It is also a term used by educational authorities to denote young people who are defiant or difficult, or whose actions undermine the functioning of the school system. Either way, troublemakers and their actions are disregarded, seen as lacking legitimacy, seriousness, and purpose. The youths in Schumaker's text challenge these dismissive assumptions. The young black and Latinx activists who fill her study are far from aimless. Instead, their actions articulate a clear and consistent rebuke of racial oppression, as manifested in school segregation, unequal funding and resources, disproportionate disciplinary policies, the lack of culturally relevant curricula, and the absence of teachers of color from the classroom. Moreover, in bringing their demands for racial justice through the schoolhouse doors, and facing the ire of teachers, administrators, and school boards in the process, these youths and their advocates ignite broader debates about whether, and how, constitutional protections apply to students. Thus, as Schumaker argues, these troublemakers are key historical actors whose struggles are crucial to our understanding of both students’ rights and the fight for racial equality.

Schumaker is keenly interested in the intersections between race, law, and social movements, and she crafts a compelling argument for rereading the history of students’ rights “through the lens of race” (p. 2). This is achieved largely through a series of case studies that make up three of the book's five chapters. These accounts make clear that many of the landmark cases encompassing students’ rights sprang initially from the efforts of black and Latinx youth to contest and combat the racism of the public education system. As Schumaker states, regarding black youth in Mississippi whose in-school display of “freedom buttons” with political messages sparked a controversy over freedom of expression, “They did so out of concerns that ranged beyond the issue of free speech,” concerns that ultimately struck at Mississippi's unequal education system and “the edifice of Jim Crow” that upheld it (p. 17). However, as young people in Mississippi, Denver, Columbus, and elsewhere found their protests met with suspensions, expulsions, increased police presence, and other forms of reprisal, they and the lawyers and organizations who defended them crafted defenses rooted in the logic of constitutional protections. As these local- and state-level battles around free speech, equal protection, privacy, and due process unfolded, they produced long-lasting national consequences. The precedents set in the Mississippi free speech cases of Burnside v. Byars and Blackwell v. Issaquena, for example, were cited by the Supreme Court in the far more well-known Tinker v. Des Moines case only a few short years later.

Putting the growth of students’ rights into the context of “a broader struggle against racial discrimination and segregation in American education” allows Schumaker to reveal the larger motives that underlay these court cases (p. 2). It also allows her to show that even as the courts chipped away at the previously unquestioned authority of schools and school boards in students’ rights cases, they avoided the kinds of decisions that would have amounted to a full-throated denunciation of educational inequity. For instance, parents, students, and communities in the post-Brown v. Board era sought to broaden the application of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause to address unequal practices in curriculum, language, and discipline, and even to argue for a fundamental right to education itself. The courts, however, hewed to a much narrower conception of equal protection, one focused almost exclusively on the physical separation of students based on race. By adopting a more conservative posture toward equal protection and declining to recognize education as a right, they hamstrung wider student efforts to challenge racial inequality.

As the later chapters, which shift from a local to a national scope, make clear, the hesitancy of the courts with regard to students’ rights reflected not only long-held beliefs about the proper role of children and young adults in schools, but also the more immediate social and political backdrop of the era. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a “punitive turn” in American politics, the primary victims of which were black and brown youths who found themselves increasingly criminalized, both on the streets and in the schools (p. 173). The school system mirrored the “law and order” politics that the country at large had embraced by becoming preoccupied with a perceived, yet largely unsubstantiated, disciplinary crisis. By the late 1960s, public opinion polls showed that “discipline beat out school funding, drug use, and even busing and desegregation” as the educational issue that most troubled Americans (p. 181). In this context, student protest in almost any form was considered a cause of potential chaos.

In all, Schumaker's work is well-researched and captivating, presenting a new and much-needed narrative of the students’ rights movement. Importantly, this account not only deepens our understanding of the evolution of students’ rights but also points to the “unfinished business of the Black Freedom Struggle” (p. 130). In particular, it makes clear the ways in which the educational remedies that the legal system offered, while breaking new ground in many ways, never fully addressed the most pressing demands of students and their communities. By centering young troublemakers and their voices, Schumaker brings their demands back to the fore and suggests that it is incumbent on us to continue to “listen to the students” in the present (p. 214).