Syllabus
CLASSES
Class 1: Introduction: The Black Freedom Struggle in the USA Before 1933
Class 2: African Americans and the New Deal
Class 3: The Forgotten Revolution? Black Americans in the Second World War
Class 4: Civil Rights in Cold War America
Class 5: The Movement Takes Off: The Sit-Ins and Freedom Rides
Class 6: Martin Luther King and the Nonviolent Civil Rights Movement
Class 7: Ella Baker and the Grassroots Freedom Struggle
Class 8: Black Power and the End of the Civil Rights Movement
Class 9: Black Politics in the Post-Civil Rights Era and the Election of Barack Obama
Class 10: Do Black Lives Matter in Modern America?
Class Topics, QUESTIONS and Readings
CLASS 1: INTRODUCTION: THE BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE IN THE USA BEFORE 1933
Summary
This class provides students with an introduction to the history of African Americans during the eras of Reconstruction and racial segregation. Reconstruction (1863-1877) was a remarkable period in American history, not least because it witnessed the election of black politicians to high political office within just a few years of emancipation. This class explores the tenacious efforts of black men and women to build strong community institutions across the South in the face of often ferocious white terrorism. While acknowledging the importance of the black family and the black church, it places the ongoing freedom struggle within its historical constraints, not the least of which was the deep and enduring prejudice of local whites. That prejudice found concrete form in the emergence of the Jim Crow South, a society marked by the legal segregation of the races and, for blacks, the ever-present threat of white violence. Although this system was oppressive, it was not wholly unchanging. Events such as the First World War, the so-called Great Migration of southern blacks to the urban North, and regional economic growth all influenced the lives of African Americans before the New Deal. So too did the ‘accommodationist’ strategy of Booker T. Washington, the most important southern black leader of this period.
Questions
How successfully did African Americans negotiate the transition from slavery to freedom?
Why did the freedpeople fail to secure equal rights and security after the Civil War?
Account for the creation of the system Jim Crow. How did the system change between 1890 and 1933?
CLASS 2: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE NEW DEAL
The New Deal of the 1930s was a watershed in American history because it witnessed major federal government intervention in the economy and society. Blacks, historically Republican in their orientation when they could vote, now switched to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic party in ever increasing numbers. This week we will investigate not only whether their political switch brought them significant dividends but also the extent and consequences of enhanced interracial cooperation within the American labour movement.
Questions
Did the New Deal help or hinder African Americans?
How did blacks negotiate the Great Depression?
Reading
Harvard Sitkoff, ‘The Impact of the New Deal on Black Southerners,’ in James C. Cobb et al, eds, The New Deal and the South: Essays (1984), 117–134.
Document
W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Postscript,’ Crisis, May 1934 (Available via Google Books at https://www.google.com/search?q=du+bois%2C+segregation%2C+may+1934&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-ab)
CLASS 3: THE FORGOTTEN REVOLUTION? AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Historian Richard Dalfiume has described World War II as the ‘forgotten years of the Negro revolution.’ During the conflict African Americans fought a war on two fronts. Although unprecedented numbers of black men and women served in the United States Army, African Americans continued to endure widespread discrimination and prejudice in civilian life. This class assesses how African Americans were asked to risk their lives to restore democracy overseas while being denied basic rights at home. This situation in turn heralded a new era of black political mobilisation, but the actual process of racial reform remained painfully slow.
Questions
What impact did Word War II have on African Americans?
To what extent, if any, did the war undermine Jim Crow?
Reading
Richard Dalfiume, ‘The “Forgotten Years” of the Negro Revolution,’ in Allen
Weinstein and Frank Otto Gatell, eds, The Segregation Era, 1863–1954: A Modern Reader, 235–47 (1970).
Document
A. Philip Randolph, ‘Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense on July 1, 1941,’ Black Worker, May 1941
CLASS 4: CIVIL RIGHTS IN COLD WAR AMERICA
Summary
The Cold War had a mixed impact on African Americans. Initially, Soviet efforts to embarrass the United States by using the latter’s dismal race relations as a weapon of propaganda induced the federal government to take steps to put its house in order. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional represented the culmination of federal desegregation efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The global struggle to contain communism, however, ultimately caused Americans to prioritise consensus over conflict – left-led unions that had done much to promote civil rights were cowed during the McCarthy era and southern segregationists strove to suppress civil rights activity by linking it to subversion. Black protest against the indignities of Jim Crow continued at the local level, however, yielded a major victory in 1956 when the buses of Montgomery, Alabama, were integrated after a year-long campaign led by a dynamic young preacher named Martin Luther King. Many white southerners responded angrily to what they saw as attempts by an oppressive federal government to change their way of life. As historian Michael Klarman suggests, their campaign of ‘massive resistance’ to preserve Jim Crow had important consequences for the developing civil rights movement.
Questions
In what respects did the Cold War assist African Americans?
In what respects did it obstruct their progress?
What impact did the Brown decision have on the black freedom struggle?
Reading
Michael Klarman, ‘How Brown Changed Race: The Backlash Thesis,’ Journal of American History 81 (1994)
Document
Zora Neale Hurston, letter to the Orlando Sentinel, 11 August 1955
CLASS 5: THE MOVEMENT TAKES OFF – THE SIT-INS AND FREEDOM RIDES OF 1960 AND 1961
Despite the Brown decision and the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, the civil rights movement stalled in the late 1950s. Massive resistance to court-ordered school desegregation in the South prompted the Eisenhower administration to tread carefully. Tokenism and gradualism characterised federal civil rights policy in the late 1950s and leading civil rights groups like the NAACP and the SCLC did little to accelerate the pace of change. In February 1960 four black students in North Carolina kickstarted the modern civil rights movement by protesting at a segregated lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. Their protest inspired a wave of student protests across the South, supplied eager new foot soldiers for the movement, and led directly to the creation of a vibrant new organisation, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC or ‘Snick’). This lecture explains the significance of the sit-ins and the well-publicised ‘freedom rides’ of 1961 which furnished Americans with visible proof of the violence underpinning Jim Crow.
Questions
Consider the view that the modern civil rights movement began with the student sit-ins of 1960
What impact did the ‘freedom rides’ have on the black freedom struggle?
Reading
Iwan Morgan, ‘The New Movement:
Annotation
The course is a bloc-course and will be taught from Monday 15 April to Tuesday 23 April 2019. Professor Cook is visiting Charles University as part of ERASMUS + exchange from the University of Sussex.
This course examines the history of the ongoing black freedom struggle in the United States since the New Deal era of the 1933. Although its primary focus is on the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, the course provides an overview of the African American experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and assesses the validity of the concept of a ‘long civil rights movement’ grounded in the industrial labour movement of the 1930s and 1940s as well as the racial controversies of the Second World War. One of our main goals is to understand the debates, disagreements, and downright fights that African Americans have had among themselves in the modern era. We will also assess arguments over the relationship of blacks to the U.S. government, over racial and class identities, and over diverse tactics and strategies for the advancement of the race. In addition, we will consider the impact and significance of different forms of leadership and organisation as well as the gendered dimensions of the black experience. The lectures will bring the story up to date by assessing the effectiveness of African American involvement in mainstream politics (culminating in the election of the nation’s first black president in 2008) and explain the rise of new forms of black activism in the modern era, culminating in the recent creation of the Black Lives Matter movement.