This course examines the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) from the Great Depression to the present. The CRM is most popularly identified with its heroic period, from 1954-1965, that featured watershed legal and legislative victories, but the movement predates school desegregation and continued long after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. This seminar will explore the CRM in four parts. social movement leaders; the grassroots and community activists; presidential leadership; and contemporary civil rights struggles for voting rights and criminal justice reform and their national policy impact. We will play close attention to how ordinary people, community activists, social movement leaders, politicians, presidents, and the American people debated, shaped, and thought about national policy, especially as it related to bread and butter issues of employment, residential and public school segregation, housing, criminal justice, voting rights, citizenship, and democracy.
This class is cross-listed with HIS 392. HIS is the home department.