Tag Archives: youth

Going Public “For Real”

Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org | March 2026

White young people just walked in the front door of the Greenville, South Carolina, main library in 1959. Not so for 18 year old Jesse Jackson (1941-2026). The books Jackson wanted to read during his freshman Christmas break from University of Illinois took a lot more.

Jackson’s local McBee Avenue Colored Branch didn’t own what Jackson wanted to read. Instead, the McBee librarian used a favor and wrote a personal note to get him an appointment with the main Whites-only Greenville County library staff.

Even with his note, Jackson had to use the main library’s rear entrance. The librarian read his note and responded “It’ll take at least six days to get these books.”

Reasonably, Jackson replied, “Couldn’t I just go back in the shelves and look for them… where nobody else would see me?”

“You cannot have the books now…” the librarian answered, “that’s the way it is.”

A policeman, standing nearby (probably because of the advance appointment), joined in, “You heard what she said.”

Jackson, the future civil rights titan, reportedly stormed out the library’s back door. He circled around to the front of the building and read the inscription written in its granite entablature,

“That thing says public, and my father is a veteran and pays taxes.”

Greenville Eight and Two Unidentified Adults (Greenville County Library Website)

1960, The Greenville Eight (Greenville County Library Website). Jesse Jackson upper left.

Jackson vowed to return over the summer promising to make the library “go public for real.”

Jackson, good to his word, returned to Greenville later in the summer, and, along with 7 other young people, entered the main library and mounted a 45-minute sit in. They became known as the “Greenville Eight,” mostly kids from Sterling High School (5 girls and 3 boys).

The library director promptly called police who arrested them all for “disorderly conduct.”

According to the American Library Association, later that fall, Greenville became South Carolina’s first public library to desegregate in response to Black community activism. ¹

Among all of Jesse Jackson’s myriad civil and human rights campaigns, throughout his long and productive life of progressive activism, his career as an activist began as a teenager at his local public library.

Of course, this story also begs questions about the myths libraries continue to tell about being “free for all.” Today’s criticism of racist public policies targeting the Black community, and Black peoples’ often heroic struggles to overcome them, rather obscures legacies of how public libraries complied with racial segregation. Further, the story illustrates the American Library Association’s still unacknowledged complacency and silence in how the institution looked the other way for decades. ²

Such civic heroism also rests uneasily against the vision that public libraries generally hold of young people – as needy, skill-lacking, individual information consumers. Upon learning the history of reform and innovation young people initiated libraries would do well to revise their visions of youth.

But an equally pertinent story resides, especially for our YouthFacts readers, in how young people, teenagers (Jesse Jackson was a teenager himself in 1960) led the movement to integrate their public libraries. This story of young people at the forefront of the broader movement to integrate public services also documents the leading roles young people assumed across the nation. And, like so many histoires of social movements, it ignores the roles young people so often play in pursuing social justice, as I pointed out in my previous critique of Ken Burn’s new documentary of the American Revolution (see my December 2025 YouthFacts.org blog post).

¹ George M. Eberhart, “The Greenville Eight: The Sit-in that Integrated the Greenville (S. C.) Library, American Libraries, 1 June 2017.

² For a critique of public library reluctance to reconcile its complicity with racial segregation, see Wayne A. Wiegand, “Sanitizing American Library History: Reflections of a Library Historian, Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 90, no. 2, pages 103-120. For specifics on Jackson’s Greenville library protest, see, Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand, The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018.

What Ken Burns’ The American Revolution Gets Wrong: Youth

Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org| December 2025

Ken Burns’ new 12-hour PBS The American Revolution examines the War for Independence. As viewers with formal education, we might question some of Burns’ choices and narrative style. I certainly do.

But adding Native Americans, Black Americans, and women as part of the grand story taught to us in grade school – about a dashing General George Washington and his brave patriot troops – deploys, on its face, a laudable aspiration. The effort also deserves praise for including real historians instead of the media commentators pervading previous Burns films.

Still, there’s more to consider. First, among the eminent historians included in the film, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood – both Pulitzer Prize-winners – published their classic works on the history of the revolutionary period decades ago (Bailyn in 1967 and Wood in 1991). I read them in grad school in, 1992.

However, the groups Burns now claims to finally include, in fact, have appeared in serious historical accounts for nearly a half-century!

Why are there always new books about Abraham Lincoln? Because historians constantly ask new questions, revisit and reinterpret old evidence, and uncover new evidence.

Conversely, Burns does not challenge with new questions or pose fresh inquiry in pursuing the contradictions, virtues, and the social complexities (even hypocrisies) among the founders and patriots, and between them and those loyal to England’s King. Instead, he delivers what is now a very conventional, if not old, interpretation.

For our YouthFacts.org purposes, and our focus on truths about young people, Burns misses a clear opportunity.

Young people’s contributions appear sprinkled throughout The American Revolution. But only in passing. The ranks of the Continental army were constituted of this 15-year-old, that teen girl’s diary reflections, that 16-year-old, another 14-year-old. Youth left their families, farms, and took up arms against the Red Coats and their cannons.

How much effort would it have taken to recognize youth, along with the other diverse groups, Burns highlights? And what would acknowledging their sacrifices in that bloody episode of American history mean for our current perceptions and assumptions of today’s youth?

Nearly every day brings another claim, another frantic panic, another prohibition – another layer of how technology brainwashes young people, how their unformed capacities produce anti-social behaviors, expose them to one mental disorder after another and worries about their growing up tranquilized by computer screens.

Unless we argue that the unchanging neurobiology and undeveloped brains of 18th century young people recklessly led them into battle against the world’s most powerful army, we must question today’s pervasive assumptions about youth development theory and young people’s inherent incapacities for becoming “thriving adults.”

We owe those teenagers thanks for helping to establish the nation; yet today we rarely ask or expect anything from them.

On Doing Democracy in “Third Places:” Youth Citizenship Education

On Doing Democracy in “Third Places”: Youth Citizenship Education

Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org | August 2025

Among the vast numbers of books and articles published each year touting youth and promoting youth organizations, rarely is there anything new. Indeed it is all too expected to read cliches about building agencies and creating spaces in which youth “participate.” Certainly, public libraries have engaged in this rhetoric for decades.

But for all our claims about being youth “advocates,” “partners,” and “allies,” for all the conference presentations and annual book awards, for the decades of institutional visibility of “youth services” in national and state-wide organizations, one finds the appearance of libraries in non-library literature absent.

While libraries proclaim we’re the “heart of community youth experience,” few others studying youth feel the same. Even in a collection of writings advocating youth in multi-generational democratic spaces, “libraries,” predictably, do not even rate mention in the index.

How could issues of youth and democracy and society press more urgently than now? We’re going to need people who remember valuing these things.

Library rhetoric aside, organizations committed to quality youth experiences can engage a fitful debate about what it takes to build with youth rather than upon them.

In their newly edited collection, Canadian ethnographers Stephanie Gaudet and Caroline Caron, both full professors, pose the best articulation to date about how young people experience democratic education in organizations actively promoting and teaching with them. The work offers 3 distinct parts: one on theories of youth as citizens; one on educating youth into participatory democracy, and a final section examines case studies of youth making meaningful contributions to public (read “civic”) action.

Authors offer responses about why so many organizations come up short with respect to youth and what they can do to get better. In analyzing 7 partner organizations, Doing Democracy in “Third Places:” Youth Citizenship Education (2025, University of Ottawa Press) offers much for organizations to learn.

I hope libraries listen closely.

Among the collection’s most valuable contributions is a critique of the century old “youth development” paradigm as applied to field practice. Social theorists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists among others have criticized youth development for decades. But it is a rare and altogether overdue moment to see that critique finally “land” in the world of professional practice. Certainly, it would be a fool’s errand to search for professional publications that do not worship at the altar of youth development theory.

This collection, at long last, challenges essentialist assumptions about young people and “adulthood” that informs nearly all professionalized youth services (in the disciplines of social work, education, law, certainly psychology, and librarianship). Further, Gaudet and Caron argue passionately for a view of youth citizenship that “rejects adult norms by dissolving the boundaries by which minors were historically viewed as ‘citizens in the making’ – in the name of a prejudice that presumed their age limited their intellect and autonomy.” (p. 42).

For Gaudet and Caron and their co-authors, progressive organizations, inspired by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (long ago adopted by all 196 countries, except only the United States and Somalia), envision a multi-generational approach characterized as “civic citizenship” in which adult allies plan initiatives for youth contributions before implementing them to check the exercise of too much adult influence. Achieving greater youth autonomy, they argue, requires practicing youth autonomy to a much greater extent than generally observable.

There are other moments of sophisticated argument not commonly found in writing about youth organizations. Authors offer signpost warnings for youth to be skeptical and distrustful of adult power, (i.e.,“It’s like they were using students to promote their image” [p. 164]). Authors also warn about insensitivity to degrees of privileged youth (an all too rare critique in the U.S. of social class distinctions between youth) – something akin to both what I and our YouthFacts Principal Investigator, Dr. Mike Males, and I have called “Teen Panel Syndrome,” in which youth are “cherry-picked” to advance adult agendas.

Another all too rare focus advocates for programming outcomes (things that youth find actually changed for them), rather than organizations simplistically counting attendance or “sign-ups” as “success” indicators. Such outcomes include youth valuing new social connections with peers and adults, discovering new interests and finding new motivations, and contributing to meaningful projects.

Still another very provocative insight offers how professionally trained and credentialled adults, in interposing their own learned practices, assumptions, and methods, often appear trained into poor listening and, inadvertently or not, enacting patronizing behaviors toward young people.

Ultimately, Doing Democracy in “Third Places” argues for what one contributor characterizes as “horizontal relationships” between adults and young people in which power relations, identities, and status roles become more flattened out rather than institutionally stratified in static professional hierarchies. Gaudet and Caron offer a simple aspiration: organizations must actively build for and value youth contributions not mere “participation.”

At a time when the democratic sensibilities of the adult world appears wobbling on its axes, Doing Democracy in “Third Places” holds out hope for preparing young people to put it right.