Struggling in Freedom's Birthplace: Black Activism and Racism in 20^th Century Boston

This course explores Boston’s racial history during the twentieth century. We examine the role that African Americans have played in the making and remaking of the city. We focus on major events and figures in Boston’s civil rights movement and the struggle for racial justice: newspaper editor William Monroe Trotter; activist Melnea Cass; the development of Freedom House; Ruth Batson, Ellen Jackson, and the movement for school desegregation; Bill Russell and the Black Celtics; the segregated Red Sox; the political career of Senator Edward Brooke; white violence and busing in the 1970s; the campaigns of Mel King. We read primary source documents as well as the most recent scholarly monographs.