HIST 890 - RETHINKING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

This course explores the most powerful social revolution in American history: the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. We look at the movement as a nationwide phenomenon. While it was anchored in the terrain of the Deep South – particularly Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia – grass-roots struggles also shook northern cities such as Boston and New York, and surged across the Midwest and West Coast. We study well-known leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., along with other activists and organizers: Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Medgar Evers, and Bob Moses among them. We examine the idea of the “long civil rights movement,” explore regional similarities and differences, balance the role of national leaders versus local struggles, and consider what the movement changed in the end.