Teaching American History Application Survey

March 29, 2010
The Civil Rights Movement

Seattle Segregation Maps, 1920 and 1960, part of the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project at the University of Washington (set of eight maps of the city divided by ethnicity, available online at http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/segregation_maps.htm) (8 pp.): Until the late 1960s, Seattle was a segregated city. Non-whites were excluded from many jobs, neighborhoods, schools, stores, restaurants, hotels, and other places of business—even hospitals. Racial discrimination in Seattle, however, did not just target African Americans. This set of detailed maps, drawn from U.S. Census data, shows how the residential patterns of various groups – including Negroes (as they were called at the time), Chinese, Filipino, Native American, and Japanese—changed between 1920 and 1960. The maps illustrate the growing concentration of people from different communities and illustrate the depth of Seattle’s racial discrimination, because residential discrimination led, among other things, to de facto educational discrimination.

“Crisis in Levittown, Pennsylvania,” documentary film produced by Lee Bobker and Lester Becker as part of “A Series on Changing Neighborhoods,” Dynamic Films (1957) (available online at http://www.archive.org/details/crisis_in_levittown_1957) (31 min.): A powerful and very teachable short documentary about the arrival in August 1957 of the Myers, a college-educated and professionally aspiring black family into the all-white middle class community of Levittown, Pennsylvania. Through interviews with community members, the film portrays the range of responses the Myers met. Several hundred hostile white neighbors harassed the young family, burned a cross on their lawn, and smashed their windows, yet others organized to defend the new family. The film is a powerful case study of racism and resistance to discrimination in the United States. It is available for free online and, at 31 minutes, can be easily incorporated into a classroom session.

John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963, part of the John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA. (4 pp.): In this speech, which broadcast nationally on the same day that the National Guard had to ensure the admission of two black students to the University of Alabama, President John F. Kennedy envisioned a broad civil rights agenda driven by moral necessity as much as legal requirements. Influenced by the events of 1963 in Birmingham and elsewhere, Kennedy called for congressional action to stop street action and contended that voluntary action would be insufficient to meet the challenge at hand. He acknowledged the extent to which racial discrimination transcended the boundaries of north and south and highlighted the contradiction inherent in preaching freedom to the world while maintaining a class and caste system domestically. This speech introduced Kennedy’s comprehensive civil rights plan, which Congress would enact as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after many months of debates and delays, as well as the President’s assassination, In addition to the full text of the speech, teachers can play an audio file of the speech as delivered by President Kennedy, available online at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/mediaplay.php?id=9271&admin=35

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Speech at the Great March on Detroit,” Detroit, MI, June 23, 1963 (6 pp.): A week and a half after President John F. Kennedy announced his holisitic civil rights vision, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a version of his “I Have a Dream” speech that would immortalize his spirit and his movement. The 1963 “Great March on Detroit” was enormous, with 200,000 people led by King and William Reuther, the United Auto Workers President, down Woodward Avenue. The event marked the 20th anniversary of the 1943 Detroit race riots, during which stores were looted, and buildings burned, most located in a black neighborhood roughly two miles in and around Paradise Valley, one of the city’s oldest and poorest neighborhoods. At the end of King’s commemorative march, he called for participants to contribute to the movment by ridding their own northern communities of segregation and discrimination and also by marching on Washington, DC in support of the President’s Civil Rights bill. Two months later, during the March on Washington organized to support civil rights legislation, King repeated his dream for freedom, justice, and equality at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in front of 250,000 black and white Americans.

Civil Rights: The Awful Roar,” Time Magazine, August 30, 1963 (9 pp.):Written two days after the March on Washington, which many people consider the height of the non-violent civil rights movement, this article interestingly names as the “spokesman and worker for a Negro consensus” not Martin Luther King, but instead Roy Wilkins, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).This article contrasts Wilkins’ leadership style with King’s and compares the different movement/organizations they ran. The key distinction highlighted is Wilkins’ openness to using a range of techniques to undermine racial discrimination – including violence – as compared to King’s non-violence. The article furthermore outlines racial disparities across a number of areas, including housing, voting, and education.

Excerpt from the United States Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968) (available online at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6545) (10pp): In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson created an advisory committee to investigate the riots plaguing North American cities over the previous three summers and to make future recommendations. The resulting Kerner Report argued that urban Africans Americans were often disadvantaged and isolated within their communities. It further warned that unless Congress created legislation to promote racial integration and to increase African American’s opportunities through the creation of jobs, job training programs, and decent housing, a separate and unequal system of apartheid would emerge throughout the country’s major metropolitan areas. But President Johnson ignored the Commission’s warnings. Just a month later, after the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968 more than 100 U.S. cities erupted in riots. In this excerpt from the Kerner Report, the Commission identifies patterns in the riots and seeks to explain them.

Ross Barnett, “No School in our State will be Integrated,” Sept. 13, 1962 (2 pp.): Resistance to racial desegregation was fierce, as this televised address delivered on September 13, 1962, by Mississippi governor Ross Barnett illustrates. In this address, Barnett explained as a matter of states’ rights his refusal to admit a black student, James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi despite a Supreme Court ruling in his favor. Two weeks after Barnett’s speech, riots ensued as segregationists opposed the integration of Ole Miss. Federal troops were necessary to ensure the court order and with it Meredith’s enrollment.

Excerpt from What's Going On?: A Guide Booklet Prepared Especially for Students and Their Parents to Help Them with School Problems and the Law, published by the Freedom House Institute on Schools and Education (1975) (1 p.): This letter to students written by the Director of Freedom House, a renowned community center in Roxbury , Boston, sought to discourage them from fighting whites and one another. Instead, it argued that they should know their rights and focus on getting the best education possible. Freedom House more generally worked to reduce violence around busing. This letter was published in conjunction with a booklet addressed to students and their parents regarding how to respond to busing concerns.

Lyndon B. Johnson, “To Fulfill these Rights,” commencement address at Howard University, June 4, 1965 (3 pp.):On June 4, 1965, a few weeks after the march from Selma to Montgomery and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s subsequent address to Congress calling for voting rights, the President went to Howard University to give a Commencement Address to an audience that was newly desegregated but still largely disenfranchised. In this speech, Johnson explained why civil rights alone were insufficient and why affirmative action was necessary to close the racial and economic gap between blacks and other Americans and to create true equality in the country.

Ella Baker, “We need Group-Centered Leadership,” in Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (eds.), Let Nobody turn us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal (New York: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), pp. 398-400 (3 pp.): In this essay, originally published in the Southern Patriot in June 1960, civil rights leader Ella Baker laid out her vision of the movement that included a significant role for young people alongside adults. Her group-centered leadership model encouraged students, young people, and citizens in local Southern communities to organize using the principles of nonviolent resistance without waiting for the NAACP or Martin Luther King Jr. It became a model for the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her determination to encourage ordinary individuals and communities to save themselves was instrumental in civil rights victories of the 1960s.

Fannie Lou Hamer , “The Special Plight and the Role of Black Women,” in Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (eds.), Let Nobody turn us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform and Renewal (New York: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), pp. 419-422 (4 pp.):An important figure of the civil rights movement in Mississippi and nationally, Fannie Lou Hamer originally delivered this speech at an NAACP meeting in 1971. Her speech declared that black women need to work together to improve the economic, political, and social condition of the race. Hamer challenged people to move beyond their own circumstances and conditions in order to empower and uplift all black people.