Civil Rights Week, 2/27 – 3/2
by admin - February 24th, 2012
This coming week will be three class session focused on the movement for black civil rights. There’s a lot of reading; some of this will be familiar territory for you, and hopefully some of it will also be new. Don’t assume you already know the story – there’s more to it than typically shows up on a “Black History Month” bulletin board. Look for the parts you didn’t know before. Resist the urge to simplify or reduce the movement to a few major leaders — remember, it was a decades-long, grassroots effort involving southerners and northerners, blacks and whites, journalists and politicians, preachers and domestic servants, sharecroppers and labor organizers, singers and athletes. The movement and its leaders have become a powerful American myth–but look for ways to understand the movement’s reality, not the myth.
Mon 2/27: Phase I (up to about 1963).
Reading: HOT 93-116 (Brown, Declaration, Sitkoff, Moody). Bring the HOT book to class. You may want to read the relevant parts of Moss’s MO also – check the index for this topic and brush up on the main outlines of the story.
Wed 2/29: Congress Day 4. We will take up some Great Society legislation and put the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Congressional context.
Video links:
Fannie Lou Hamer testifies before the DNC Credentials Committee, 1964
LBJ, “We Shall Overcome” speech, 1965
Fri 3/2: Phase II (since 1963).
Reading: MO 139-143 and HOT 117-132 (Black Panthers, Rosales, Indians of All Tribes)
