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Aaron G. Fountain Jr., "High School Students Unite! Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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Erin G. Fountain Jr.
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Erin G. Fountain Jr.
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Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
- [02:07]
Jen Hoyer
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer and today I'm speaking with erin G. Thompton, Jr. Author of High School Students, Teen Activism, Education Reform and FBI Surveillance in Post War America, published by the University of North Carolina Press in December 2025. High school students Unite highlights the crucial impact of high school student activists in the 1960s and 70s, and I am excited to dig into all of this today with the book's author, erin G. Fountain, Jr. Erin, welcome to New Books Network.
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Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Thank you.
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Jen Hoyer
And before we dive into talking about the book, I would love if you could introduce Yourself, maybe you can share a bit about your background, where you grew up, what kind of path your education has taken and what you're up to these days.
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Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Ah, that's a good question. I guess I'll start where most people start. So I was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1991. So suburban community in Lehigh Valley, a suburb of Allentown on the eastern part of the state, about five miles away from the New Jersey border. And it was important for me, most important to share about myself is the fact that grow. I mostly grew up in Bethlehem, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. But in the ninth grade I started moving around and went to eight high schools in three different states, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and fl. And it's important because that's kind of where my interest in education come from. Because of the different various schools I went to, they had some disciplinary problems. Some of them the curriculum was severely behind and it allowed me to learn for the first time before I was even aware of sociology and history, that socioeconomic status and race affects the education that students receive. So I carry that well into college. And when I went to college, I went to Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, made majored in history with the aspirations to be a history professor and got enrolled into graduate school and at Indiana University, did a master's and PhD in history. But in the process of doing a PhD I realized I wasn't that interested in an academic career. So I started to explore different options at an internship with the National Park Service in Lincoln, Nebraska. And eventually I settled on public history. So prior to six months prior to finishing, I went to Cleveland, Ohio, where I was the lead historian for the Cleveland Civil Rights Trail. So I was responsible for installing historical markers around the city, building a website, doing oral history interviews and various other community based projects. And then from there I got a job at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture where I was the web content editor for two years. But the job of course expanded beyond that. I was literally kind of like the digital curator. And that ended abruptly in March. As with a lot of federal agencies currently Washington, D.C. so yeah, currently I'm just on the market. But I said with a book coming out, it kind of had my spirits lifted throughout the process.
- [05:09]
Jen Hoyer
So let's talk about the book High School Students Unite examines the history of high school student activism in the US in the 60s and 70s. And maybe you could talk a bit about more of your motivations for writing the book and some of the big questions that guided your research.
- [05:29]
Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Yeah, no problem. So, well, short Answer. When I tell people. When I tell people my research, they always ask me, was I a student activist in high school? And I said, no, because I want the eight different ones. So it wasn't possible, but my interest in it came by accident. When I was in undergrad, I joined the McNair Scholars Program, which is designed to diversify the academy. And I was told to do an original research project. And yes, I was passionate in history, but I had no idea how to write about something that nobody has written about before. I kind of scrambled. Didn't know what to do. But coincidentally, I was taking a public speaking course, and one project we had was to give a persuasive speech. So I decided to do one on the Pledge of Allegiance, Whether should under God be in it or not. And during the research, I came across a book by political scientist Richard Ellis, to the Pledge or to the Flag. And it was pretty much a history about the Pledge of Allegiance. And in one chapter, there's a section about junior high and high school students who sat during a Pledge of Allegiance as a form of political protest in the 1960s and 1970s, and voila, I found a topic to write about. And, yeah, I did oral history interview this. Not much archival research because I didn't have funds to travel, but I did, you know, scanning newspapers on microfilm. And to be honest with you, it wasn't a great project. I cringed at it then. I still cringe at it now. But what happened is that I saw so many passing references to high school students participating in the anti Vietnam War movement and civil rights, black power. And it made me wonder, like, well, how did one of the most divisive issues of the time, the Vietnam War, affect high school students? And that led me to go to the university library, and I came across a book by Gail Graham, Young Activists, American Teenagers in the Asian of protests, published in 2006, which is a pretty general survey of high school student activism. And so, yeah, I decided to focus on the San Francisco Bay area. I wanted to look at a region of the country where I know there would have been some action. And, yeah, that led me to do a summer research project. And it turned into my first academic article published when I was in graduate school. And from there, in graduate school, I just started to continue writing about high school student activism. I will say the book is actually more what I originally envisioned. So when I was on my. When I proposed my Prospectus As a PhD candidate, I remember they just thought it was unrealistic. Oh, no, I'm going to look at Philly, I'm going to look at New Orleans, look at the Bay Area, New York. And yeah, retrospect, that was way too grand because dissertation should focus on no more than three locations realistically. So, yeah, I focus on San Francisco Bay area, but in graduate school I did research constantly, sometimes every day of the week. And I kind of knew eventually that whenever I turned this to a book, it wouldn't be suitable enough to just focus on one region. And there wasn't much scholarship written on it. And then high school student activism was occurring nationwide and international too. I mean, I have records from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, you name it even, and of course the non western countries as well. So. And doing the research, it expanded. I said it was about anti war, but then I started looking at race and surveillance came up because I did wonder whether the FBI spied on high school students. And we'll talk about that a little later in the interview about the FBI's angle. So yeah, it was just more questions and also just realistically understanding that because there was such a very few scholarship, very few books written about it, that the likelihood that somebody would come along and write about high school student activism, like in Albuquerque, New Mexico or Omaha, Nebraska, were pretty limited. So that's kind of why I wrote the book in the way that I did. And more importantly, it could have been easy to write a book where I. Like a typical academic monograph, you give like three dozen examples to uphold the argument. But because I was talking about kids and I interviewed a lot of these people and their stories were quite impressive and funny because they're teenagers, I really want to write a character centric narrative. So I just take a selection of curated stories because I realized no book can do everything.
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Jen Hoyer
Yeah, that's true. But I don't know, it was really fun to explore so many places and so many personal narratives in your book. And so the book itself is in three different sections. And the first focuses on politics, the politics that really drove the movement. There were a huge range of issues that motivated student activists in this era. Can you share some examples of how high school students became involved in activism and the different types of issues they were organizing around?
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Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Okay, well, the first, the two main issues that pretty much gives birth to the high school movement are civil rights and the Vietnam War. So in the first chapter, I talk about a free speech controversy, which isn't really unique in the history of student activism. A lot of like college campuses, their first controversy over like some activist movement was over free speech. But it's really important for me. In the first chapter, which I talk about San Francisco's high school free speech movement, which wasn't a mimicry or copycat of what happened at Berkeley. It was actually an organic effort among high school students to reverse a citywide ban that the superintendent, Harold Spears, impose on them regarding an underground citywide underground newspaper called the Activist Opinion. And referring back to when I said how this is character driven, I interviewed about close to 10 members of the group. They're not all mentioned in the book, by the way. I got in contact with many people from the group. And one thing I noticed too, is that a lot of them had came from backgrounds where their parents were involved in the civil rights movement or they were involved or sympathetic with the Communist Party. And some of them, of course, were like the brightest students in the school. Some of them, like one guy who I interviewed, Jesse Tepper, admitted that he graduated the bottom 13th of his class. Another guy admitted that he repeated the second grade. So it varied ideologically. And this. The students organized Education and Action League called Seoul. Like Seoul, South Korea, or Seoul Music. It comes together. It was an effort among leftist students in the San Francisco Bay area to come together and create a group in the underground newspaper to talk about, like, progress of topics. So they often talk about civil rights. They were really the first in the region, the first organized collective of teenagers to critique the Vietnam War, which they did in the underground newspapers. And the critiques are really sophisticated, coming from teenagers. They had a much better understanding of the nuances of the Vietnam War than the average American did at the time, largely attribute to their radical upbringing and the social balloons they inhabited as children and teenagers as well as. And yeah, I mean, talk about, like, youth issues in the group as well as, like radical politics. And when the superintendent first comes across it, he considers it to be subversive and communistic. So he bans it and leads them to pivot and to organize a free speech campaign. Now, it's not like Berkeley. There's nobody sitting on top of a car roof. There's no large crowds, microphones. It's literally just students going to board meetings and debating whether they. Whether as minors, they have constitutional rights and whether they can have free speech rights in schools. It fails ultimately, but the ideas that they have really resonates with the high school movement. It's a fun fact about this. The superintendent of San Francisco at the time, Hero Spears, is from Indiana, and his documents are at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. So that was a nice finding to be enrolled into a program and just went down there. And I get these minute by minute transcripts of the board meetings, which is why I'm able to quote what was said at the meetings in the book. And the other issue too is Vietnam. High school students as early, of course, the majority of high school students support the Vietnam War. So it's important to understand too that the opinions of teenagers reflected the overall attitude of the American public at large. Dissenters are only just a minority. But as early as 1965, high school students started critiquing the Vietnam War. You see certain parts of the country, like the Northeast, the upper Midwest and out west, and it's only when they start bringing the anti war activism to campuses that school administrators started cracking down on it that they realized, like, okay, we need to organize another way to exercise our constitutional rights for free speech. Which leads to a whole host of clashes in high schools at this time, but largely stemming from civil rights and the anti war movement.
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Jen Hoyer
And something that you've mentioned and comes up throughout the book is the key role played by high school underground newspapers. Newspapers. Can you talk a little bit about what these publications were and their role in the high school student movement?
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Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Yeah, to me it's the. I'll be honest, I like the book I wrote, but it's my favorite chapter in the book, chapter five, about the high school underground press. It's the most impressive endeavor to come out of the high school movement. So let me say what an underground newspaper is. Pretty Underground newspapers are alternative publications. They have existed, what, prior to the 1960s and in the 60s you can get these community based underground newspapers pretty much anywhere, like a bookstore, cafe, a library, street corner. They were pretty much like the most ubiquitous countercultural presence you would have seen at the time. Well, it should be coming. It shouldn't be shocking that teenagers themselves created their underground newspapers, but it was, it was largely in response to censorship. A common theme throughout the United States of the fact that a student would want to write about a subject in a school newspaper and they get told that they can't or the article just gets banished. And so they gather together and create their own underground newspapers. And they were not all political. I once saw an underground newspaper of, of theater kids. I just wanted to talk about theater. So it very, it varied. Now the typical underground newspaper would have literally been a one page or a two page leaflet with a bunch of text, and it would exist there for only like one or two issues. That would have gone away, but increasingly, at least by the late 1960s, you start getting these Underground newspapers like the New York High School Free Press or Noah's for Free in Denver, Colorado, where they actually have a staff, they have writers, and sometimes the writers have to disclose, like, their grades and their spelling proficiency agency. They dispatched them to different parts of the city where they actually reported on high school student uprisings and interviewed students on other various issues. They even had, like, a photographer. Yeah, a photographer who went around the city and took photos of different demonstrations. And these would be like 16, about 16 page tabloids. They read just like a newspaper. And they would print them on mimeograph machines. And primarily they circulated on high school campuses. But not only one campus. Increasingly, by late 1960, you would get citywide papers. So, like, the New York High School Free Press, at its peak had a circulation of 40,000 copies per issue. And the same thing in Indianapolis in the early 1970s. The corn cob Curtain, at its peak, had a circulation of 3,000 issues per paper. And the students would hitchhike around the city to distribute the paper to different college campuses. But the main focus of the high school underground press was literally a way for high school students to inform one another of what students were doing, not just in their community, but around the country as a way to erode isolation. Because one thing when I talk about the story, Grant Cooper, who joins a Southern Student Organizing Committee, which is kind of like a white sncc, and creates an underground newspaper called Iceberg. And the point of that paper is really to tell students in the south that, yeah, what happened in New Orleans, you might think that's impressive. It couldn't happen where I live. And then it'll report a story of, like, a rural community that had a student uprising and show, like, hey, this can happen in, like, Jonesboro, Georgia, Georgia. It could certainly happen wherever you live. And also in the book, too, I focus on the cooperative High School Independent Press Syndicate. So a syndicate is a newspaper exchange. So basically, let's say, like, my house is the headquarters and I have 10 subscribers. They always send, like, five issues to me, and I will send each one issue to each subscriber and keep some for myself as well as send them to bigger syndicates. Well, high school students learn that from the Liberation News Service and other syndicates that the offices that some of them actually work in. So you get the High School Independent Press Service, which was the first high school oriented syndicate that kind of collapsed in less than a year because many of the members joined the New York High School Student Union. You get a syndicate in the Chicago area called fred, the acronym stood for nothing. And the biggest one is the Cooperative High School Independent Press Syndicate which starts in the Chicago suburbs, moves to Houston, Texas, D.C. then later Ann Arbor, Michigan. And it exists for about 1969 to 1979, but by 1974, 75 it starts to decline. But over the course of this existed it had correspondence with 700 publications from over 40 states, several Canadian provinces, England, Puerto Rico, New Zealand and Australia. And this really as a guy who one of the founders told me it was kind of like a social media of his era as a way to connect high school students and show them that yes, high school student activism was something not only national but international. And it documented high school student activists at a much more impressive lead. And what any mainstream publication did.
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Jen Hoyer
VRBO helps you swap gift wrap time for quality time. Go to VRBO now and book a last minute week long stay and save over $390 this holiday season. Book your next vacation rental home on VRBO. Average savings $396. Select homes only. So then moving along to the second section of your book, this section focuses on issues of race and you highlight that students of color focused on all the same issues that white students, but they also tackled racism and racial inequality. Can you describe for listeners how racial turmoil in public schools galvanized students in different ways and maybe give some examples of the different types of demands that students of color were making?
- [19:39]
Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Oh yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I said when writing the book, one thing I didn't want to do, I didn't want to do the typical thing. A lot of monographs on the 1960s written for general audiences where they'll have like overview of the 60s. They only have one chapter on race when race was like the biggest and most significant issue of the era. And that was true on the high school scene as well. And I talk about race from three different angles. The first one is student uprisings. Now I will say when it comes to race, racial issues and fomenting protests occur way prior to 1960s. There's a documented history of black high school students in the south since the 1920s protesting like segregation, protests for integration. And of course there was notable demonstration like the Birmingham Children's March, which had a lot of teenage participants in the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially after the assassination of Dr. King. You do get really, I would say a conservative estimate like well over a thousand or close to a thousand of student uprisings. They could occur just at one school, they occur at multiple schools, or they could be citywide, like in Boston, 1971, 50% of black students across the city boycotted the schools. And the number of participants could be several hundred, several thousands, or tens of thousands. Chicago, 1968, it was 35,000 students who boycotted school. And in Los Angeles, the most notable one, I think most people know the East Los Angeles blowouts. You get anywhere from like 10 to 20,000 students who walk out of school that week in March 1968. So, and what sparked and the sparks were it varied. I mean, it could be a racist statement, a teacher or an administrator said. It could have been a racial. It could have been a racial base or a racial conflict that occurred that broke out in a southern bigger trigger police violence or intervention to student protests or racial violence or a policy that students disagreed with that could lead them to forming a walkout in school and made public demands. And normally the demands kind of dealt with. They wanted to remove police officers from campuses. They wanted more black and Latino teachers and administrators. Soul food or Mexican American food served in the cafeteria. Better improved facilities. A lot of these schools that these students attended were dilapidated. So that was a way to mobilize him, too. And a whole range of issues. In the book, I talk about the Mission High School strike, which, interestingly, when you think about San Francisco at this time, you might think of the San Francisco college strike, which indeed was the largest. But in 68 and 69, multiple high schools in San Francisco experienced a student uprising for different reasons. There was a school, George Washington High School, it was over a mural depicting slaves. And at Polytech High School, it was over a letter that teachers had written that really was just a huge character assassination of the student body and admission. High school, which I focus on, it starts from a racial class between Mexican American, well, really Latino students and black students. And the police come in and beat all the students up. And in response, it leads them to create a unified student strike, which really occurs largely in the school board. But of course, the administration doesn't really respond to their demands. So that leads to the next chapter on High School Bill of Rights. So these campaigns were not as theatrical as student uprisings, but because student uprisings had mixed results, where sometimes school administrators would acquiesce to the demands, but in many cases, they asked, it would just bury them to say, we'll look at it. And then over the summer, it just never comes up again. And then the issue kind of fades away. High School Bill of Rights, more so, were a way for high school students to cement a lot of grievances they had into policy district wide policies. So I focus on Philadelphia, Philadelphia, which is not the largest high school Bill of Rights campaign, but it's really one of the more significant one because it resonates with students in other parts of the country where at conferences they actually learn about what high school students in Philadelphia did to implement their own Bill of Rights campaigns. And Bill of Rights campaign, largely it dealt with the same issues that student uprisings had, but it was more so written policy. So the whole school board's more accountable, accountable to implement them. And then I look at racial violence. So racial violence was also a way that galvanized black and Latino students to action. I'm taking a pause right now. I feel a little tired.
- [24:08]
Jen Hoyer
No, that's totally fine.
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Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Yeah. So there's no, really, there's no accurate number for how many racial violence incidents occurred on high school campuses. There's estimates I know from Walter Stern article about black rebellions. He stated in Louisiana, I think there's well over 50 or 40 of them. And some of them occurred well into the late 1970s. So I focused particularly on a high school in Cleveland, Ohio called Collinwood High School. That wasn't an accident. When I lived in Cleveland, that's when I first learned of the story. And when I surveyed the literature, I was kind of shocked to find that there was nothing comprehensive written about it. Besides, like, the most I saw written about it was three paragraphs in the anthology and that was it. And so in Collingwood High School, it was a school that, where the neighborhood was integrating because African American residents from a neighboring community were moving in because of overcrowding. And as a result, the white residents in Collinwood, which was largely working class immigrant based, well, descendants of immigrants like Italians and Slovenians, they start to engage in a systematic or orchestrated campaign of racial terrorism. Pretty much where teenagers, young adults, and even adults well into their 50s would physically attack children as young as like 12 years old going to school or going home from school. And this went on for 10 years. It will culminate in huge riots at the school. Like 1965, you get 700 to 800 people gather outside of the school. And as black students come from off the buses, about a dozen fights break out before school, right outside of the school, school. And in 1970, the largest one, well, not the largest one, the most significant one that many people in Cleveland remember is when 350 people stormed the building. And faculty rush black students to the third floor, to the third floor attic. And the students create a barricade down the stairs. And the mob doesn't break in and nothing severe happens. The mob eventually leaves, but Mayor Carl Stokes asked the governor to send in a National Guard. And 700 National Guardsmen sit outside. Are really based in two suburbs, Cleveland Heights and Shakers Heights, just in case, like, violence foments again that day or the next day. So they naturally entered Cleveland proper, but they were there. And there's no happy ending to Collingwood. It doesn't really lead. The violence just kind of fades away and then people kind of move on. But what happens too is that, you see after any incident of racial violence, like black students would often go to school administrators and would advocate for policy. They wanted more rigorous code of conduct to suspend students, much more more easier. And they also wanted curriculum reform like black history taught. So it really reflected the same demands that students made in uprising as well as Bill of Rights campaigns. But it's really as a way for black high school students to mitigate racial tensions in the school. And white parents and students make demands too, but it's more retaliatory and it's also really racist, actually. They actually wanted black students, like, take removed from the school as well as investigated for, like, marijuana or allegedly sexually harassing, like, white girls. And they're believed that the mere presence of black students was contributing to the racial friction on campus. So. And so this occurs all across the country. Different reason. Might be a desegregated school or might be just a newly integrated neighborhood, and they might last for like one incident or several or. McCala was 10 years.
- [27:44]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah. And then, I mean, one thing that I kept seeing come up in that section of the book, but then you focus on it for the whole third part of the book, and you've mentioned already in this interview is surveillance. There was so much surveillance going on. So can you talk a little bit about the different surveillance mechanisms and actors in the high school student movement and what impacts this had on the. The movement?
- [28:10]
Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I should say how I even came across this topic at first. So I was back when I was an undergrad, I was largely suspicious of whether the FBI had spied on high school students. And I remember a political scientist at my campus telling me that he would be surprised if the FBI didn't do so. I submitted a FOIA request on the United Student Movement in Palo Alo, California, and was told that nothing existed. And I did that because I remember reading an underground newspaper where students who are part of the group bragged about being spied on by the FBI. And so I kind of just put the subject Away, went to grad school, decided I was going to write a seminar paper on a New York high school student union. And when one of the former members sent me dozens of pages of his memorabilia, there were two pages that had the FBI file on the group. And I was immediately stunned. And I went to another professor asking, how do I write a FOIA document? Because the first one I sent actually wasn't written properly. And he sent me his template and I used it for the New York High School student Union and realized I was too late because the documents had been destroyed in 1979, 2010 and April 2014. Ironically, I had just sent the request August of that year. So realizing that the National Archives and Records Management destroy documents regularly, I started to just draft as many names as I could that I had come across in my research and just submit requests. And yeah, immediately I had like, documents from, from Minnesota and Milwaukee, El Paso, Texas. And these documents took anywhere from. Sometimes I got them immediately, but others took two to six years to get. And others I'm still waiting 10 to 11 years later. It could take quite some time. But what's so interesting in the surveillance documents that I had was the role that school administrators, parents and fellow students played. They all were informants. Sometimes they were recruited, but many times they, out of their free will, contacted the FBI to report on their own kids. Well, parents report on their own kids. School administrators report on the students that they that were in their school than other fellow teenagers who reported on their classmates. And so from 1961, so FBI surveillance occurred largely from 61 to 1979. But the bulk is really the Vietnam War era is when most of these surveillance operations occurred. And surveillance looks different. I mean, it can be like having an informant sitting on a meeting, or it could be watching, oh, gathering newspaper clip, is watching television program, listening to radio, as well as to collecting documents that school administrators, parents and students forward. But more importantly, they did and in some cases successfully undermine high school student activism when they put teenagers into cointelpro. And that usually entailed writing fictitious letters to parents or were forwarding packages to school administrators about like SDS or something else that was really slanted from the FBI's perspective. So one example I give in the book is in Milwaukee, or suburb of Milwaukee called Maquon, where the FBI forwards a citywide high school underground newspaper called the Open Door. And Kaleidoscope, which was a community underground newspaper in Milwaukee. They forwarded it to a high school principal in Maquan, and in red pencil, they underlined objectionable statements and they don't know tell her what to do. But in response, she takes both publications to the school board and advocates that the school board creates a more stringent code of conduct. And unanimously, the school board approves of her request. And the new policy states that any student caught with either publication will be automatically suspended or expelled from school. So in a way to successfully undermine it, the political activities of Milwaukee teenagers in that suburb, because there was a much greater risk of having either those publications and your personal possessions. And sometimes they do. They would also write fictitious letters to newspapers like they did in St. Louis, Missouri, which actually persuaded school administrators to ban outside speakers from like SDS from coming to the school to speak. Or sometimes you could successfully get school administrators to ban SDS as a group, as a chapter group forming in the high schools. And this went on from. Yeah, 65. Yes, 61 to 76. And most impressively, it creates a large paper trail of long lost documents because school administrators, students and parents were forwarding published materials that students had. I was literally able to create my own archive of documents that have long been lost. Like in chapter one, I have every copy of the activist opinion, but some of those copies I've only seen in the FBI file. So without it, as I said in the book, much of the book couldn't have been written if I didn't have these documents.
- [33:02]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, absolutely. Which I guess is like a great segue to talking about research. And this is a slightly self indulgent question because I'm a librarian and I like talking about source material. But all of this, like surveillance apparatus, as you've said, creates so much documentation. And it's kind of an amazing resource for researchers who are trying to piece all of this together, even if we don't necessarily love the surveillance apparatus itself. And so I know this documentation was really just one of the types of source material you used. Can you share a bit more about your research process and all of the places that you were able to gather information on what was going on in this movement?
- [33:48]
Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Yeah, I think like any typical historian, you do archival research. I mean, I went to like 11 different states. States. There's two states I don't have in my bibliography, Michigan and Massachusetts. Just because I didn't really. Any story I told didn't come from any of those archives there. So, yeah, you know, it's like university archives. But when it comes to high school students, traditional university archives, they're good, but they're really not as sufficient, especially when you start looking at places that aren't as documented as well. Like when I wrote an article about high school student activism in Indianapolis, one of the largest collections I came across was at North Central High School where in a I asked, can I look at your school newspaper? They said, sure, but we also have other things, we don't really know what it is. And then when I got there, there were literally several boxes and I think like two or three of them had like high school political material from like 1970s. And I saw copies of the underground newspaper I was writing about, but also underground newspapers that existed at the school. And like inter school communication files and school based archives are kind of hard because, well one, when you come contact a school, they often don't respond to your emails. And then when they do, you can't just willy nilly show up. You have to like schedule an appointment, get your visitor sticker, and then you're also on a time constraint because the person that's like helping you have other job duties they gotta do. They don't assist our researchers, they don't really function as archives. So I really knew like, okay, I gotta get through this material as quick as possible and get out of here. But I actually enjoy the schools that were labeled to allow me to collaborate because it also was an educational experience for them to learn about history that they didn't really know about. And I will definitely say this research, digitized newspapers helped a lot with this research because when I was able to find the names of members of the group and the names of student organization underground newspaper, that's how I was able to contact people for oral history interviews. And the FOIA request helped too because I created in a book I have a list of over 500 independent student organizations and over 1000 high school underground newspaper papers, which I actually started documenting just out of curiosity. Then I did it to help me with my four year request and I figured like, okay, I should put this in a book because I can't talk about everything. And when I was, when I was writing my dissertation, I would tell people I focus on high school student activism in the San Francisco Bay Area. And the response would always be like, oh yeah, of course. And then I kind of realized, well, okay, that that perception is going to lead people to think that yeah, that could happen in San Francisco, but I would never happen to say where I'm from, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania or I don't know, rural Maine, you name it. But I'm like, no, it occurred in every urban, suburban and rural areas, every pocket of the country, to different degrees. Of course. I Mean, nobody in their right mind would think Boise, Idaho would have the same level of activism in San Francisco. But activism there, of course, did exist. And yeah, there's been more newspapers that's been digitized. Sometimes states have done their own. So normally I would go through them and I would just put in certain keywords largely to find the names of groups. Groups, actually. So, for example, the chapter I have about Albuquerque, New Mexico, probably like the most unlikely place I talk about in my book that came because the Albuquerque Journal was digitized and I found a group called the Youth for Radical Progress. And I submit a FOIA request and I get 198 page document. And the document was so rich because school administrators, for a full school year collaborated with the FBI and forward almost everything that that group published. So I actually didn't even have to visit Albuquerque to do the research. Research, not saying I don't think there would have been much to find in Albuquerque because this was like unauthorized activities. Of course, in oral histories too, you know, not all history is written. And I realized I wanted to show the humanity of the people I write about. One of the persons I interviewed, Paula Garve, she read my first article I published about anti war activism in high schools in San Francisco Bay Area, and she told me that she liked it. But I feel like you forget the fact that we were still kids and like, you know, there's still jealousy and there's still like, does this person like me or not? All the ups and downs of adolescence were all there. So that, that's why I wrote the book the way I did. I'm okay. I got to really emphasize the humanity that people I talk about. And I. I did over 70 oral history interviews with people. Of course, I there I could have done over a hundred. But some people tragically passed away sometime literally a month before I reached out to them. And of course, some people they might have been interested in, for whatever reason they decided to get, weren't. So I never heard from them. Another archive that's really helpful with this book was personal possessions, which I know anybody who works in archives or museums. Those are like, sometimes the hardest things to get because people can be pretty guarded about their materials. But whenever I contacted somebody or interviewed them, I always ask, hey, do you have anything in your possession? And these range from several pages to 600. The largest collection I found was a former junior high school principal in Palo Alto, California, who saved boxes that were going to be destroyed in the 1970s when a school district was cleaning out the basement. And he Kept them in his garage for several decades. And I was like the first person, not the first person. I was like the first researcher to look at them. And he donated them later to a small archive that's very limited. It's only open two days a week. So I was kind of happy that I was able to look at those records. Tragically, there's people I contacted who, like, one guy, he was from Florida, he had like two boxes of underground newspapers. He's like, I don't know what to do with them. I'm like, I'll be able to look at them up. I was in D.C. he was in Philly. He's like, sure. And if whatever reason, he just stopped responding to my email. So I never got a chance to look at them. So I noticed there's a lot of records across the United States that are sitting in people's homes, and sometimes they don't know what to do with them. They might not want to touch them, but they're there. And some have increasingly, over the years, years donated them to archives. A person who grew up in rural South Dakota recently donated the large collection of high school underground newspapers from that state to the state archives.
- [39:47]
Jen Hoyer
So, yeah, like, more stuff to go explore and read all the time. Well, I've taken a lot of your time, but before we wrap up, we really love giving authors an opportunity to share what they're working on next. No pressure at all. But I'm curious if there are projects you're working on now that grow out of this book, whether formal or just things you're continuing to read informally and bring, brainstorm new things or other totally different projects that you're turning to now.
- [40:14]
Erin G. Fountain Jr.
Well, yeah, it's a second book, but I'm still getting FBI files. By the way, I knew when this book came out, I wouldn't have every file in my possession. And I'm still submitting FOIA requests. So I have some positive matches from places that don't appear in the book, like Boulder, Colorado. So I'm just waiting on those and the documents that I requested 10 years ago. But more importantly, my second book project grows out of this. It's something I wanted to do when I first entered graduate school. It's about the cultural and political history of teenagers in the Vietnam War. But I don't want to just regurgitate the material I already have. So I'm including Canada, Australia and New Zealand. And New Zealand. And I long known that Australia had its own anti war movement. I was completely oblivious about Canada. And then when I so far I've done oral histories with Canadians and visit the ARC library and archives in Ottawa. Found a vast amount of material and for listeners who might not know about Canada's role in Vietnam, of course Canada doesn't send troops whatsoever, but it does support the U.S. canadian politicians don't criticize Washington policy, even though they privately kind of disagree with it. They export $2.5 billion of war materials. Some entire communities were employed by the defense industry in Canada. And they also send aid to South Vietnam as well as tested the chemical part as part of Agent Orange on Canadian soil. So as the recent book that came out called the Devil's How Canada Fought in Vietnam, he opens a book with said, Canada has always been a warrior nation. And that was true in the Vietnam War. So in response, most Americans often think of Canada as being a safe haven for war resisters. So young men who cross the border, I know some people think of draft dodgers or military deserters, but most of them shoot to call themselves war resistors. Yeah, that does happen. But there was like a separate organic anti war movement in Canada that paralleled that of the United States, and one where American and Canadians were in constant communication. They exchanged correspondence with one another. They traveled across the border, which was really easy at the time, to different conferences. I briefly allude to a woman in my book named Sue Claus who I've never been able to find. But two people I interviewed remember her very well. She was like a prominent teenager, teenage anti war activist in Toronto. I still wish I could find her, but I just can't. Yeah, and that book is. I'm pretty much trying to show readers that when you center the experiences of teenagers. I argue that the anti war movement would not have been as vast, durable or as contentious without the participation of high school students. Because when they participated, they were able to bring the issue of the war to community cities like suburbs and small towns that largely had no public controversy regarding the war whatsoever. More importantly, I also want Americans to think of the anti Vietnam War movement as a continental one, not strictly one base of the United States. So that's what I'm working on. I got like five chapters written so far and I'll start pitching it to. I'm trying. I'm aiming for a trade press. I'll start pitching it to literary agents in January. One is currently interested, but I haven't heard back from them two months, so.
- [43:29]
Jen Hoyer
Well, that sounds really neat. Thank you again so much, Erin. Once again today I've been speaking with erin G. Fountain Jr. Author of High School Students, Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Post War America, published by the University of North Carolina Press in December 2025. My name is Jen Hoyer, and you're listening to New Books Now Network.