2. Central Course Frameworks
• The “long” civil rights movement.
• Geographic, political, and historical contexts for activism.
• Goals, tactics, and strategies.
• Action and reaction; resistance and repression.
• Continuities and breaks.
3. What do we know about the Black freedom struggle?
In small groups:
• Discuss what you know (especially what you have been taught in
school or have learned from popular culture) about the civil rights
movement. If possible, indicate the source of the info.
• Identify key figures, movements, and events.
• Also consider when, where, why, and how the movement took
shape, who was involved, where it occurred, and what it
accomplished.
Take notes in this Google doc.
4. What story do we know about the civil rights movement?
“Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. In the
1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the Court, courageous
Americans, Black and white, took protest to the street, in the form of sit-ins, bus boycotts,
and Freedom Rides. The protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Dr. Martin
Luther King, and aided by a sympathetic federal government, most notably the Kennedy
brothers and a born-again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial
discrimination as a moral issue.
Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to
remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil
Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Dr. King was tragically slain in 1968. Fortunately, by that
time the country had been changed, changed for the better in some fundamental ways. The
movement was a remarkable victory for all Americans. By the 1970s, Southern states where
Blacks could not have voted 10 years earlier were sending African Americans to Congress.
Inexplicably, just as the civil rights victories were piling up, many Black Americans, under
the banner of Black Power, turned their backs on American society.”
--historian Charles Payne, describing the “master narrative” of the civil rights movement
5. The “Master Narrative” of the
Civil Rights Movement
• SNCC veteran Julian Bond lamented the centrality of the “master narrative”
in common depictions of the civil rights movement.
• This narrative portrays an inevitable march toward progress and equality
that positions racism as a deviation from American ideals rather than a
central facet of American history and society.
• It centers the “morality” of American political leadership and political
institutions and suggests that, once white Americans realized that
segregation and discrimination were “wrong,” the nation quickly changed.
• The master narrative positions elite male leadership at the national level as
the central driver of change, upholds inter-racialism and nonviolence as the
defining approaches to Black liberation, suggests that the movement was
generally successful, and implies that radical approaches to change were
irrational and ill-advised.
6. What the Master Narrative Gets Wrong
• Minimizes the importance of local struggles and local organizing done by ordinary
people, especially Black women. implies that “nonelites lack historical agency.”
• Emphasis on norms and morality hides the importance of “disruption” and “economic and
political pressure” as key tactics propelling change.
• Emphasis on nationally known leaders ignores the complexity of and diversity among
Black Americans and overlooks crucial divisions along lines of class, gender, age, region,
ideology, etc. that propelled a variety of approaches to achieving Black freedom.
• Framework of Montgomery to Memphis (1955-1968) ignores importance of early
dimensions of struggles for Black freedom.
• Top-down perspective (ideas flowing from leaders to the masses) suggests that key
measures of change or progress are changes in laws and policies. Ignores the movement
as a transformative experience for individuals and American culture.
• Emphasis on “large-scale, dramatic events” glosses over the importance of the daily work
of organizing to sustain a movement over the long haul.
7. Race-Based Enslavement and the U.S. Constitution
Racial inequality and white supremacy were written into the nation’s
fabric by the framers in the U.S. Constitution (1787), the official
framework for our national system of government. Slavery is never
named outright in the Constitution, but two key compromises were
made to appease the power of southern slaveholding states: the Three-
Fifths Compromise and the establishment of the Electoral College,
which determines the winner of presidential elections.
8. Race-Based Enslavement and the U.S. Constitution
• The original document indicated that in addition to the “whole number of free
persons…three-fifths of all other persons” [enslaved persons] would be counted
for purposes of representation and direct taxation. The Three-Fifths Compromise
gave slaveholding states disproportionate power in the federal government by
counting three of every five enslaved persons, though they had no representation
at all in government.
• Disproportionate Southern representation in the House of Representatives
translated into disproportionate power in presidential elections due to the
Electoral College, which allotts each state a number of presidential electors
equal to the number of their representatives plus their senators. (Result: five of
the first seven U.S. presidents were enslavers from Southern states, with the
exceptions of John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams, both of Mass.)
• The Constitution also protected the continuation of the African slave trade until
at least 1808.
10. Slavery and Secession
Upon leaving the U.S. (the Union) and joining the Confederate States of America (the
Confederacy), several Southern states issued a “Declaration of Clauses” explaining their
rationale for secession. The preservation of the slave system was central to their stated
objectives.
• Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the
greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by
far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth…These products
have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and
civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of
reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of
abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out
our ruin.”
11. Slavery and Secession (cont’d)
• Texas: “The servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually
beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the
experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by
all Christian nations.”
• South Carolina: “Those [Union] States have assumed the right of deciding upon the
propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established
in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful
the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of
societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the
citizens of other States.”
• Georgia: “That reason was [the North's] fixed purpose to limit, restrain, and finally
abolish slavery in the States where it exists. The South with great unanimity declared her
purpose to resist the principle of prohibition to the last extremity.”
12. The Reconstruction Amendments
to the U.S. Constitution*
• Thirteenth (1865)—abolished slavery or involuntary servitude except as
punishment for a crime.
• Fourteenth (1868)—deemed all those born in U.S. to be U.S. citizens
with the right to life, liberty, property, due process, and equal protection
of the laws.
• Fifteenth (1870)—granted suffrage (the right to vote) to all male U.S.
citizens regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
*All Southern states that had seceded from the U.S. and joined the Confederacy were required to
ratify these amendments before they were permitted to rejoin the union following the Civil War.
15. (Left to right) Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi, Representatives
Benjamin Turner of Alabama, Robert DeLarge of South Carolina, Josiah
Walls of Florida, Jefferson Long of Georgia, Joseph Rainey and Robert B.
Elliot of South Carolina.
“First Colored Senator and
Representatives in the 41st and
42nd Congress of the United
States.”
by Currier and Ives, 1872.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
16. Significant Black political and economic
advancements during Reconstruction
sparked violent repression by White
Southerners. All remaining U.S. troops left
the states of the former Confederacy with
the Compromise of 1877, opening the door
for Southern state governments to begin
enacting laws and rewriting state
constitutions to disenfranchise Black voters
and to legalize a multi-faceted system of
racial segregation.
Black voter disenfranchisement was a key
strategy of white Southerners’ efforts to
restrict Black rights after Reconstruction.
Why?
Thomas Nast, “The Union as it Was,” Harper’s Weekly
(24 Oct 1874).
17. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
In this case, which centered on an 1890 Louisiana law
segregating railway coaches, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that segregation laws passed by states were not
necessarily unconstitutional, meaning they did not
directly violate the framework or principles of the U.S.
government and its founding document. The Plessy
decision established the doctrine of “separate but
equal,” which held that racial segregation was
permissible (and not in violation of the 14th
amendment’s “equal protection” clause) as long as the
facilities and services available to both “White” and
“Colored” people were “equal.” Plessy v. Ferguson
marked the official beginning of the era of Jim Crow
segregation, which would endure for almost sixty
years, shaping nearly every facet of Southern life.
18. White Supremacy in the “Jim Crow” South
Named for the 19th century minstrel character
“Jumpin’ Jim Crow,” the Jim Crow system of
segregation relegated African Americans to second-
class citizenship in the South. This discriminatory
system of white supremacy was supported by
structures, laws, and practices that served to
disempower, humiliate, and dehumanize Black
Americans.
19. A Tripartite System: The Dimensions of Jim Crow
• Social: segregation of facilities including schools, transportation, hotels, and restaurants;
required Black people to defer to white people in most cases; legal and extralegal
consequences for interracial sexual relationships involving a Black male.
• Economic: e.g. employment and housing discrimination; restrictions on credit;
emergence of sharecropping as new economic system in South.
• Political: restrictions on Black political participation, including voting and juror service;
racially-biased criminal justice system, e.g. in most jurisdictions, a Black person could
not testify against a white person accused of a crime.
* All dimensions of Jim Crow were supported or enabled by state-sanctioned violence that
permitted crimes committed by white people against Black people to go unpunished and
allowed white mobs to attack Black people for alleged or invented offenses.
Not just an “inconvenience” but a system of daily humiliation and dehumanization that served to solidify white supremacy through a system based on proximate racial inequality.
