STUDY THE PAST

The African American Civil Rights Movement​​

 

Over the fourteen years between 1954 and 1968, a mass civil rights movement rose in the South, bringing “city governments, bus companies and chambers of commerce to their knees. The movement created disorder so severe as to force a reluctant federal government to intervene -- on the side of black southerners, which was more surprising then it seems in hindsight today. The civil rights movement--aided by Democratic-Republican competition for the votes of recent black migrants to the North and by U.S.-Soviet competition for allies among newly independent African and Asian nations--destroyed Jim Crow, the vast system of legal segregation and disfranchisement named after a nineteenth-century minstrel character. In addition to provoking Congress to turn against its powerful southern bloc in sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the movement forced a change in the Constitution. The Twenty-fourth Amendment and new interpretations of the Fifteenth guaranteed black Americans the vote. The movement shut down a political culture of racist demagoguery and one-part rule in the southern states, a culture long underwritten by the threat of mob violence.

“The movement did all this with remarkably few causalities. Ugly as white southern resistance was, Maya Lin’s memorial to martyrs of the civil rights movement has only 40 names engraved on it. The apartheid regime in South Africa beat that figure in a single day, at Sharpeville in 1960, when it killed 67 people and wounded 200 more. In a freedom struggle closer to our own time, Chinese authorities killed some 2,600 in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen Square. American’s own war to destroy slaver, with 600,000 deaths, makes the destruction of segregation a century later appear astonishingly nonviolent. Its destruction appears a feat of moral and political alchemy.” (David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, UNC Press, 2004).

How did this happen? What were the roots of the civil rights movement? How did everyday Americans contribute to the cause? Who were the movement’s most vocal and successful leaders? How did the movement evolve and mutate over time? When did the movement end (if it did)? How are the civil rights issues of the 1950s and 1960s related to issues today? This class seeks to answer these questions by examining primary and secondary sources that deal with the subject.