Black students’ crusade for civil and human rights reached high tide circa 1954–82, then ebbed and flowed into the twenty-first century. Their post-1954 activities are far better studied, but they were crusading for rights long before.

From slavery to freedom and after, black communities linked the training of children and uplifting the race. Alongside literacy, schools and churches taught them “to be kind, honest, and trustworthy” and to seek justice. The Negro Church (1903), edited by W. E. B. Du Bois of Atlanta University, declared: “People who are thoroughly fitted for good citizenship and who show by their conduct that they have the disposition and purpose to be good citizens are not going to be permanently excluded in any part of this country from the responsibilities of citizenship” (Du Bois, 2011, p. 208). Many youths joined civic, educational, and religious groups fostering black pride and protest. National Urban League and NAACP Youth chapters picketed theaters showing The Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified the Ku Klux Klan's bloody undoing of Reconstruction. Youths flocked to the NAACP's “Silent Protest Parade” on behalf of the blacks killed in the East St. Louis, Illinois race riot of 1917. About 10,000 people marched along Fifth Avenue in New York. Echoing the “New Negro” during World War I, many young people protested against the Jim Crow military and lynching; they rallied for black and women's suffrage. Students of Fisk, Howard, and Lincoln Universities, and other Negro colleges, resisted white presidents’ antiblack policies in strikes ca. 1925–27.

During the 1930s–40s black collegians pushed not only to free “the Scottsboro Boys,” nine Alabama blacks falsely convicted of raping two white women, but in “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” boycotts; and pickets for equitable relief and work, labor's right of collective bargaining, and peace. They advocated different ideologies – liberalism, socialism, communism, antifascism, and pacifism, to name a few – in both black and interracial organizations. The latter included the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC).

An offshoot of the National Negro Congress, which enlisted a spectrum of groups, the Communist Party (CP) among them, SNYC was cofounded in Richmond, Virginia by James E. Jackson in 1937. A graduate of local Virginia Union University, he joined the CP; served in the army 1943–46; and was CP southern regional director to his 1951 prosecution for subversion.