In 1961, Edythe Paige approached employees at Houston's Loews State Theater to purchase a movie ticket. Coins in hand, she was refused service and beaten by the theater's manager and white patrons. A Black student at Texas Southern University, Paige was charged with unlawful assembly, along with 22 other supporters of the Progressive Youth Association. The injuries sustained from the white segregationists' many blows landed her in the hospital for four days.
Paige was one of hundreds of students across the South who put their bodies in harm's way to advance 1960s desegregation efforts. As she recovered, The Student Voice published Paige's account alongside the letter she penned to Attorney General Robert Kennedy and President John F. Kennedy, pleading with the men to "extinguish the gross injustices" taking place in Houston.
The Student Voice was the newspaper of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the only national civil rights group in the 1960s. Founded in 1960 to coordinate and support the sit-ins movement, SNCC mobilized Black university students to challenge racial segregation through nonviolent, direct action, such as sit-ins and boycotts. The newspaper covered student-led desegregation activities from youth perspectives in service to SNCC's cause and the broader Civil Rights Movement.
In its first edition, the SNCC's Committee on Communication noted that the paper was to be distributed within the student movement and have a system dedicated to alerting the nation of emergencies and serious developments in the movement's struggle. A majority of the publication consisted of regular and prompt reports that the editorial staff urged student activists to submit to the SNCC office.
Many civil rights era wins are credited to the steadfastness of youth organizers. And without The Student Voice's willingness to go beyond (and ignore) various journalism industry norms, the students' burning desire for equality would've lacked its vital narrative fuel source. The Student Voice offers today's U.S.-based media organizations with a model to combat the ongoing and escalating public embrace of fascism.
It was uncommon for news organizations to post a letter written by a person like Edythe Paige, a young Black woman living states away from Georgia, a hotbed of civil rights organizing. According to "A Program for the Student Voice," outside press coverage of SNCC's activities was "rare and far between" for the majority of the paper's five-year existence. If news organizations covered a student-led demonstration, they'd most often short-quote organizers, focus on sensational reactions from racist opposition, or only highlight riots and popular individuals like John Lewis.
The Student Voice published everything—SNCC meeting recaps, poetry, mutual aid support for expelled students, comics, activist-written demonstration reports, and incidents of police repression and voter suppression. Editors even used the paper to thoroughly explain the philosophy of nonviolent action and the electoral process.
Today's average news organization is so captured by concerns of "objectivity" that it avoids telling stories that encourage readers to take vital action. We've recently watched news organizations meekly accept the Anti-Defamation League's framing of Elon Musk's Nazi salute as an "awkward gesture" and publish faux-neutral stories about attacks on trans rights, fueled by journalism industry giants like the New York Times.
The Student Voice never shied away from publishing radical information. In the July 1967 volume for example, the editorial staff dedicated two full pages of its eight-page issue to Palestinian liberation during the Zionist entity's 1967 occupation of Palestine and its allied neighboring Arab nations. In it, they informed readers of the history of Zionism and the United States's open-handed support of Zionist terror in both Palestine and Africa.
Compare that move with the recent pitiful reporting following journalists Sam Husseini and Max Blumenthal's disruption of former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a main character in Israel's ongoing slaughter of Palestinians. Edythe Paige's story would be of no use to the Civil Rights Movement if she were covered by CNN anchor Pam Brown, who would have likely provided no historical context, refused to name Paige, and referred to her actions as "cringeworthy heckling."
Journalism in service of liberation—movement journalism—is risky business. In 1967, SNCC learned that the U.S. Post Office in Atlanta had destroyed at least 600 of the organization's letters. And although a USPS employee said destruction took place over the course of two months, friends of SNCC said they hadn't received any letters for much longer. Some reported not receiving any letters from SNCC at all.
The Student Voice offers today's U.S.-based media organizations with a model to combat the ongoing and escalating public embrace of fascism.
As SNCC began to embrace Black Power philosophy following the leadership change from Chairman John Lewis to Chairman Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and endorsed the end of the Vietnam War, state opposition to the organization grew. Raiders broke into SNCC's Bay Area regional office in 1967 and stole subscription lists from the SNCC-affiliated newspaper, The Movement. One of the paper's editors, Terrence Cannon, said the raid was a consequence of the "climate of oppression" fostered by folks like J. Edgar Hoover.
Hoover was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time and dedicated agency resources to COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence surveillance program meant to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groups, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters." In his 1967 memo establishing the program, he named SNCC as one of many targets and encouraged FBI field offices to take "enthusiastic and imaginative [approaches]" to the program.
Hoover's rhetoric and intention mirror the efforts of the 16 Republican senators who recently demanded the Internal Revenue Service revoke the tax-exempt statuses of nonprofits and foundations that supported the National Students for Justice in Palestine. It's clear that the state fears an energized, narrative-proud youth populace that is willing to struggle for liberation. And although U.S. officials are using a decades-old script of misdirection and fearmongering, the journalism industry is in a worse position to amplify youth-produced movement media than it was in the '60s.
According to history professor and former SNCC member Clayborne Carson, by August 1964, SNCC was mailing more than 40,000 copies of The Student Voice to SNCC donors and supporters in the North, Southern college campuses, and SNCC projects and affiliates throughout the South. At that time, the paper was under the direction of Julian Bond, a 24-year-old, Atlanta-based organizer from Morehouse College who was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives a year later.
A young Julian Bond would likely not prosper in today's youth media ecosystem. His home state of Georgia has yet to expand student expression laws after the Supreme Court ruling in the 1988 Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier case, which stated high school administrators are allowed to censor stories in school-sponsored student publications if a story poses a "legitimate pedagogical concern."
The ruling took place after over two decades of the most expansive youth-led organizing in the country. The Hazelwood ruling effectively muzzled a cross-section of the nation entrusted with the hyper-local reporting on movements around civil rights, Vietnam, Black Power, Chicanos, women, and queer folks, to name a few. In the aftermath of the case, schools began using the ruling to censor non-media student activities—art shows, debates, and academic journals.
As supposed cheerleaders for democracy, the journalism industry has largely treated student censorship as a non-issue. Sometimes news organizations even add fuel to the flames surrounding attacks on student free speech. For example, in 2024, The New York Post wildly mischaracterized a yearbook story titled "Times of Palestine" written by a Houston area Bellaire High School student. The sensationalized coverage made it seem like the Arab student was being dismissive of the killings of Israeli Jews. A nationwide uproar ensued and the school principal responded, saying he'd soon enforce editorial protocols, which likely means he will exercise prior review and prior restraint of student pieces in the future.
If the Hazelwood ruling had taken place before Edythe Paige disrupted the racial apartheid in Houston, a high school would likely have prevented student journalists from publishing their thoughts and feelings about the demonstration. High school newsrooms are a key starting place for many radical media leaders. Now, they're regularly underfunded and policed into closure.
Today's youth are building their own news organizations outside the confines of the public school system. Digital media organizations like my own, Shift Press are meeting youth information needs while boldly asserting abolitionist perspectives. But the social media landscape is tricky.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, announced it would begin limiting "political" content on users' feeds, while Twitter, once a go-to place for information sharing, now reflects the wildest fascist and libertarian dreams of its new owner Elon Musk.
In order for digital media organizations to continue meeting the needs of social movements, we will have to tell stories offline. In other words, we will have to go back to the basics. The Student Voice was produced by local printers in Atlanta for the first three years until staff received a $15,000 anonymous gift to purchase its own printing equipment. Although they began publishing more frequently after purchasing the equipment, the paper struggled to obtain adequate funding for all of its planned activities.
According to Carson, staff "formulated, but never carried out, plans to publish a series of community newspapers in many of the Black communities where SNCC staff of full-time community organizers were active." The publication appeared for the last time in December 1965 and a series of SNCC newsletters were published until May 1967. It's worth imagining a fully funded The Student Voice and how it would have altered the wins and losses of the Civil Rights Movement and the larger Black Liberation Struggle.
If journalists are to survive attacks on our most vulnerable communities, we will have to abandon tightly held beliefs about which storytellers are worth prioritizing for support. It's time to boldly backseat the financial and social systems that favor older, richer, whiter, male, ivy-grad media workers.
The journalism industry is in a worse position to amplify youth-produced movement media than it was in the '60s.
We will always need movement journalists who understand important societal aspects, such as reproductive healthcare, so accurate information is produced. At this moment especially, we need young movement journalists who understand radical reproductive justice and can mobilize their peers by translating reproductive justice politics into language youth can better understand.
This is the moment to fund justice-focused youth media with few to no strings attached. Southern movement media workers are living in a dynamic environment, yet they are often better aware of the future information ecosystem needs than their richer, whiter, often Northern counterparts.
But even with the means to produce outside the public education system, the radical media leadership pipeline is held back by the limitation of student expression. If U.S. journalists genuinely care about the future of journalism, we need to support organizations like the Student Press Law Center and New Voices of Texas that are laser-focused on expanding student expression laws.
It's also time to ensure organizations like the New York War Crimes and the Writers Against the War on Gaza are successful in their demands (or annihilation) of news organizations like the New York Times. There's only so much we can build before we have to confront news organizations operating in ways that actively harm our communities. The longer we wait to boycott these organizations, the bigger they'll get, the more harm they'll do, and the more challenging it will be to create a healthier information ecosystem.
The SNCC staff took similar aim at Houston newspapers by republishing a May 27, 1967 story from the Forward Times that shamed local papers for misrepresenting the facts of the police attacks on Texas Southern University students. Rev. William Lawson reported that local news media regarded the police activities as "prudent" and "commendable" even though they didn't speak to any of the hundreds of witnesses.
The Student Voice was produced in the middle of a difficult and unpredictable, yet transformative time. The paper's most valuable lessons were sealed on the page for all to see. In that story, Lawson reminded us why movement media work is important: "Some people deserve to know what happened on the eventful night of Tuesday, May 16…" he said. "The students themselves, who will be asked for the rest of their lives by employers and benefactors if they have been arrested, they deserve to know."
Our people still deserve to know.