Whether in Meridian, Mississippi; Jena, Louisiana; Orlando, Florida; or Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the pattern is consistent across the Deep South – a default for Black children that emphasizes harsh discipline, even at the expense of their educational futures. The Deep South has a long and disturbing history of severely disciplining Black children. This history – steeped in race and how race impacts policies and our perceptions of people – reveals a pattern in our schools that emphasizes control and punishment over care and education. This narrative connects the experiences of Black children educated in Southern schools over several generations.
Historical Connections: Children’s Crusade March of 1963
One of the more impactful chapters of this story is Birmingham’s Children’s Crusade March of 1963. Hundreds of Black youth – some as young as 6 years old – walked out of their schools in a coordinated protest against segregation in their city, which Martin Luther King Jr. had deemed “the most segregated city in America.” This protest came a few months after Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s infamous inauguration speech declaring “segregation now … segregation tomorrow … segregation forever.” For Birmingham, segregation translated to city ordinances that challenged the dignity of Black people wanting to order a plate of food, enjoy a show, or even play a game of cards within proximity of a white person.
Birmingham’s response to the Children’s Crusade was swift and brutal. Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, escalated events by ordering attack dogs and high-pressure fire hoses to disperse the crowd. Law enforcement filled local jails well beyond capacity with Black children – all on trivial charges of “protesting without a permit.” The imagery of children being brutalized was broadcast across national media and was forever burned into the collective memories of Alabamians and the nation.
Linda Woods, a daughter of Birmingham civil rights activist the Bishop Calvin Woods Sr., participated in the Children’s Crusade when she was just 11 years old. Weeks after her protest and subsequent arrest, she and other children who were arrested received letters stating that they were being suspended or expelled from Birmingham schools. Of note, these letters were sent by the city’s school superintendent and endorsed by three members of the board of education personally appointed by Connor.
According to Linda’s court records, Black students “were expelled without any hearing and opportunity to defend against ‘the right not to be arbitrarily expelled from the public school.’” Without any due process or a fair hearing with the school system to advocate their case, the only recourse was to fight the school suspensions in court. Fortunately, Linda and other protesters won their day in court and were able to clear and reinstate their academic record. These Black children and their families had to fight against a system that would intentionally and systematically push them out of schools and into jails for something that should never have been criminalized.
The arbitrary school suspensions and racially disparate youth arrests from the Children’s Crusade are aspects of what we now recognize as the school-to-prison pipeline – a system of practices and policies geared toward pushing children, especially children of color, out of the education system and into the criminal legal system. Black children have been particular targets for this system, both in the days of Bull Connor’s Birmingham and in today’s Southern schools.
The “Superpredator Myth” and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Even very young Black children are in danger of being caught up in the criminalization of childhood behaviors. Kaia Rolle, a 6-year-old first grader in Orlando, Florida, was arrested and removed from school by police officers in 2019 on charges of misdemeanor battery.
Decades after Bull Connor’s violent tactics, John J. DiIulio Jr., a former Princeton professor, would coin the term “superpredator” in the mid-1990s to describe his theory that thousands of historically underserved youth would soon spark a colossal crime wave across the country. The superpredator theory supported the notion that certain youth had a “moral poverty” causing them to “murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.” According to DiIulio, “[Superpredators] are perfectly capable of committing the most heinous acts of physical violence for the most trivial reasons. … By my estimate, we will probably need to incarcerate at least 150,000 juvenile criminals in the years just ahead. In deference to public safety, we will have little choice but to pursue genuine get-tough law-enforcement strategies against the super-predators.” Consequently, this theory buoyed a myth that Black youth were closer to criminals to be policed instead of children to be cared for.
The perceived need for “get tough” law enforcement strategies would not only permeate public opinion but also public policy, increasing investment in harsher criminal penalties and greater investment in prisons and police. Investments in law enforcement would also manifest in public schools, as students aged 12-18 reported that 77.3% of their schools had a security guard or police officer working on campus in the 2021-22 school year, compared to 54.4% in 1998-99. For Florida specifically, the presence of law enforcement at schools nearly doubled in the 2018-19 school year after the passage of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, which mandates safe-school officers in all Florida schools. However, research also shows that Florida schools with more police officers correlate to significantly higher youth arrest rates.
Today, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education, such states as Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have out-of-school suspension and expulsion rates that rank among the top 10 in the country. Likewise, suspensions and expulsions tend to be disproportionately enforced against Black students compared to their white counterparts, even when committing similar offenses. For the 2017-18 school year, both Alabama and Mississippi were suspending a Black child from school every 15 minutes.
Even though the massive youth crime rates that DiIulio predicted never materialized – and rates have even declined nationally over the last 20 years – the policies and practices supporting the school pushout remain intact. Examples of how school discipline disproportionately harms Black children can be found in every Southern state. In 2012, the city of Meridian, Mississippi, was forced to adjust its problematic school discipline policy after the U.S. Department of Justice said it amounted to “local police operating a taxi service between schools and juvenile detention,” leading to youth arrests for minor incidents like using the bathroom without permission and being tardy to class.
Excessive punishment was on display when six Black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana, were arrested for fighting a white classmate in 2006 after several nooses found hanging on campus riled up racial tension. The then-LaSalle Parish District Attorney J. Reed Walters had boasted to students that he could ruin their lives with the stroke of a pen. He would end up pursuing inflated charges of attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy for the school fight, while failing to prosecute anything regarding the nooses even though an FBI investigation concluded they had “all the markings of a hate crime.” For the “Jena Six,” heightened concerns over superpredators drew a clearer connection between a basic school fight and murder charges than they did between nooses and a hate crime.
Even very young Black children are in danger of being caught up in the criminalization of childhood behaviors. Kaia Rolle, a 6-year-old first grader in Orlando, Florida, was arrested and removed from school by police officers in 2019 on charges of misdemeanor battery. In reality, Kaia had a tantrum in class – as 6-year-olds often do – but in her flailing, she ended up hitting an assistant principal. The police body camera footage of her arrest produced a viral video as she wailed her protests to the arresting officer. “No …
In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the case of Cory Jones Jr., a Black high school student robbed of his senior year for an offense he didn’t commit, reached national and international news. Cory was accused of marijuana possession in 2023 and was sent to in-school suspension for two months, then sentenced to an alternative school for 45 days, even though police would eventually charge someone else for the offense. According to Cory: “Nobody, nobody was listening to me. I told them the truth, and nobody listened.” This describes the nature of school suspensions in Alabama, which until recently could be arbitrarily assessed without a hearing to give students a chance to present their side of the story. Fortunately, after years of advocacy, including from Cory and his father and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Alabama passed legislation this year to create a state standard for due process hearings, affording youth like Cory more protection against arbitrary school pushouts.
The history of the maltreatment of Black children in the education system throughout the South is life-altering and long-standing. However, stories like the ones of Linda Woods and Cory Jones Jr. at least give us glimpses of what changes we can make if we collectively advocate with and for them. Both Linda and Cory were Black children of Alabama pushing back against a system determined to push them out of school and into jail. Even though their childhoods are 60 years apart, their respective families and communities knew both children were worth fighting for and were able to win important victories for social change. It is well past time to end generational injustice against Black children in the education system in the Deep South, and it is our responsibility to do so.
Read the Reports
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Only Young Once research report series on the topic of youth incarceration in the Deep South includes discussion about the school- to-prison pipeline, and policy recommendations on how we could dismantle it. For example, states could emphasize funding and resources toward community-based alternatives to youth incarceration, as well as raise the minimum age of arrest to prevent incidents like what happened to Kaia Rolle from happening in the future.
To date, the SPLC has released reports on Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida – each with state-level analyses to support a dialogue for reform. This is a dialogue that the South must have, both for the sake of our schools and for every Black child our schools are built to serve.