HIST 611G - Civil Rights Movement

Following the almost total abandonment of African Americans by the North and the federal government in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the burden of redeeming the legal and political rights that many of them had briefly enjoyed during the Reconstruction Era fell upon African Americans themselves. This course examines how the African-American struggle for racial equality developed from resistance to the further hardening of racial demarcations in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era South—marked by spiraling racial violence, the proliferation of segregation laws, and widespread political disenfranchisement—into a full-blown assault upon the ideological and institutional edifices of white supremacism during the mid-twentieth century, it evaluates the contributions made by the main individuals, groups, and organizations associated with the modern civil-rights movement. It also assesses the movement’s successes and failures, legacies and limitations.

Credit(s): 4