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When historians think and write about student activism in 1960s America, they tend to focus on college and university campuses, ignoring the fact that considerable student protest erupted in the high schools during that turbulent decade. Indeed, over the years, graying veterans of the high school student movement of the 1960s, such as I (I helped lead an antiwar walkout of my freshman class at Brooklyn's James Madison High School during the national moratorium against the Vietnam War in 1969), have felt almost invisible since our activism is rarely mentioned in the histories of the 1960s. So I opened Gael Graham's history of 1960s U.S. high school student activism with a genuine sense of excitement and a hope that at long last our protests would receive some attention.

Graham deserves a great deal of credit for reminding historians that high schools in the 1960s were an important political battleground. In some ways, the high school protests were more impressive than their collegiate counterparts because at least in middle America high schools tended to be places where free speech was severely restricted, so it was far more difficult for students to express dissent in the repressive high school environment that treated them as children in need of discipline rather than as citizens with free speech rights. Young Activists attests to the scope of this high school activism, with chapters on student civil rights protest, black power, student rights, student power, a chapter divided into sections on radical politics and antiwar organizing, and a closing chapter on school administrators' responses to all this activism. As the first historian to offer a book-length study of this neglected movement, Graham's work is pathbreaking, but it is also uneven, marred by conceptual and organizational problems, a lack of narrative structure, and major gaps in primary and secondary source research.

Since there were thousands of high schools in 1960s America, one needs a really well-thought-out conceptual framework and research strategy for tackling a study of activism in such a large constellation of schools. Graham lacks both. She never defines the parts of the high school scene she will explore, and this leads to significant problems.

Without explaining why, she focuses on public schools and has nothing at all to say about student protest in private schools, either secular or religious. Contemporary accounts, such as High School Revolutionaries (1970) by Marc Libarle and Tom Seligson, attest that elite private schools, such as Andover, were sites of considerable antiwar dissent, but such schools are never mentioned by Graham. There is not a single reference in the index to Catholic Schools, and one wonders whether the combination of Vatican II and the Catholic antiwar dissent of the Berrigans had any impact in eroding the traditional conservatism of those schools.

Equally striking is the absence in Graham's book of the high school equivalent of historically black colleges, the traditionally all-black secondary schools of the South, where the majority of southern African Americans attended high school in the 1960s. For reasons that go unexplained, Graham begins the first of her chapters on race in high school by focusing not on these black schools but on desegregating schools, even though due to massive resistance in the South and residential segregation in the North most black students did not attend desegregating schools. This lack of familiarity with the black high school scene leads Graham to leave out perhaps the most important activist campaign of black high school students in 1960s America, which occurred in Birmingham in May 1963, where some ten thousand black students engaged in protests and were arrested as part of the antiracist campaign headed by Martin Luther King Jr. When King's aide James Bevel mobilized these high school students and then even younger students a fascinating debate-discussed in David Halberstam's The Children (1998)-ensued within the civil rights movement over the ethics of recruiting such young activists. Since the students proved so pivotal in King's historic victory in Birmingham both their activism and the debate it provoked merited inclusion in Young Activists, but they are simply not on Graham's radar screen.

The chapters on desegregating schools and on black power among high school students do have some illuminating material about the racial tensions at the school sites where segregation was being eliminated in the 1960s. But the strains desegregation placed on black families needed attention and could have been portrayed effectively, had Graham consulted such powerful sources as Silver Rights (1995), by Constance Curry, which narrates the story of a black family whose seven children were in 1965 the only black students to attend a predominantly white school in Sunflower County, Mississippi.

The most striking omission in Young Activists is the paucity of contemporary student voices. For reasons that are difficult to fathom, Graham, although writing a national history of the high school student movement, does not seem to have set foot in a high school to research this book. The failure to use student newspapers, yearbooks, literary magazines, and school records is striking, and often leaves one feeling as if one is getting an aerial view or a retrospective take (she did an e-mail survey of high school activists) on the movement. Graham has ignored a wealth of high school sources that could have helped her better bring to life the texture and tone, the rhetoric and emotion of 1960s high school protesters. But she does establish that high school student activists acted independently and were not the tool of college student activist organizations, such as the Students for a Democratic Society.

For readers of Peace & Change, Graham's discussion of the antiwar movement will attract the most interest. Graham argues that "most schools-barring the occasional antiwar teacher-either promoted the [Vietnam] war or maintained a discreet silence" (p. 153). Thus, students tended to get their antiwar ideas from family, peers, or the mass media rather than from their classes. And Graham finds that students, like the rest of America, were badly divided over the war. While all of these assertions by Graham make sense, they are made in a temporal and geographical vacuum. American public and media opinion on the Vietnam War changed as the war dragged on, moving in a more critical direction as the decade progressed-particularly after the Tet Offensive of 1968 revealed that, contrary to the claims of the administration, the enemy was nowhere near collapsing. One wonders, then, if the high school political milieu changed with these shifts in public opinion, if the disdain for antiwar expression on the part of school officials and teachers diminished between 1965 and 1973-and whether the number of high school students protesting war expanded as the war bogged down, questions that Graham does not address in her all too brief discussion of the high school antiwar movement.

Graham's generalizations about school responses to the Vietnam War fail to take into account regional variation. For example, students in major centers of antiwar dissent, such as Chicago, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area, almost certainly encountered school officials more friendly to antiwar ideas and protest than would be the case in more conservative regions of the country. And here Graham has simply not made sense out of her own data. Her cursory (one paragraph!) discussion of the high school reaction to the Kent State massacre notes that student protesters managed to convince New York City school officials to close the schools for a day to honor the students killed at Kent (p. 157). Can one imagine this happening in more conservative school districts, say in Mississippi or rural Pennsylvania? Did it? Graham does not raise these questions, let alone answer them.

I raise these questions not to dispute Graham's unflattering portrait of school officialdom, which seems to have a great deal of validity, but rather to point out the need for greater sensitivity to time and place. The poet W. D. Ehrhart, a Vietnam combat veteran, has written a high school memoir that may well be the most powerful indictment of the failure of American schools to foster open critical discourse about the Vietnam War. With bitterness and regret, Ehrhart (whose memoir Graham missed) tells of how teachers in his rural Pennsylvania high school were too inhibited by the conservative Republican milieu to do more than drop subtle hints about the problems with the war, far too subtle to counter the John Wayne movies that shaped his view of the world and that led him to enlist in the Marines and to be scarred for life by the emotional horror of Vietnam. Ehrhart's experience at Pennridge High School in 1965 was so different from mine in Brooklyn in 1969-1973 (where our high school had an antiwar organization and demonstrations) that it left me wondering whether it was the time, the place, or both that accounts for the difference-and Graham's cursory account of the high school response to the Vietnam War offers no insights at all on this.

Graham's epilogue on the history of high school student activism raises some important questions about contextualizing 1960s student activism. But her attempts at contextualization are hampered by a lack of familiarity with the American Left-and in particular its youth branches. Here she suggests quite erroneously that "prior to the 1960s" high school student activists "had not audibly asked" questions about race, equality, and democracy (p. 207). Actually, in urban high schools several generations of radical students in Socialist and Communist youth groups were raising such questions, and during the 1930s, the heyday of America's first mass student movement, the American Student Union promoted Left-liberal political activism in the high schools while connecting these students to youths in labor and civil rights organizations.

Despite its limitations, Graham's study attests that the high school world was impacted in a major way by the ferment of the 1960s, and has left a contested legacy of assertiveness and conflict over student rights (embodied in the Tinker decision of 1969, when the Supreme Court affirmed the free speech rights of antiwar student protesters) that has persisted into our own time. My hope is that Graham's pioneering study will prod other scholars to dig much deeper into this history, and recognize that to understand youth in the 1960s we must move beyond the world of college and university campuses.

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