Course Description


            "Waiting for a Bus in Memphis," Esther Bubly, 1943

            This course examines four phases of the civil rights movement. In the first half of the semester we will look at the early years when NAACP lawyers Charles H. Houston and his protégé Thurgood Marshall challenged jim crow segregation and racial discrimination in the courts and leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked African-Americans to “put their bodies on the line” in the non-violent struggle for civil rights.

            In the second half of the course, we focus on the movement after the 1963 March on Washington, when the assassinations of Kennedy, Malcolm X, and King forced a reassessment of both strategies and goals. SNCC members left the south to join former gang members in the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, taking the visionary words of Malcolm X for guidance. Black power rhetoric was heard as far away as Viet Nam where African-American soldiers found themselves fighting two wars. The call for Black Power also generated a Black cultural renaissance, manifested in poetry, music, film, and “Black is Beautiful” fashion statements. African-American women discovered that the rights and freedoms they had been struggling for did not mean their own liberation.

            By the mid-1970's, the combination of Black Power and new federal voting rights laws helped to establish African-American electoral power, forcing politicians, white and black, to answer to the black community. In response, government adopted affirmative action, minority contract set-asides, school busing and race-based college scholarships as remedies for centuries of legal segregation.


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