Dara Walker

“High School Rebels” is a history of teenagers who pursued a range of ideas and strategies to fight for Black self-determination in Detroit during the Black Power era. It argues that in its calls for Black community control, the Black Power movement shifted ideas about Black youth politics a decade after psychologists had constructed “adolescence” as a distinct phase of human development. “High School Rebels” uses students’ political writings, the records of municipal institutions, the archival materials of urban coalitions, and oral history interviews with forty youth activists to trace shifts both in ideas about and the role of Black high school students as movement thinkers and actors. It reveals that examining both the political study and political organizing of Black teens sharpens understanding of the Black Power movement and the young people who shaped it. Furthermore, it introduces age as an analytic to broader questions about race and power to reveal how race and age operated together in contests over resources in postwar urban communities.