Rethinking Civil Rights and Black Power

Catalog description

This course encourages a rethinking of the complex arguments and activities that have characterized the civil rights movement. In it, students will be pushed to think beyond the master narrative of Montgomery to Memphis, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Students will understand Black agency, actions, and politics through careful reading of scholarship in the field, documentary film, and art. Students will also read primary sources alongside secondary scholarship. Each week students will focus on an individual case study, building upon the past week to understand the civil rights movements in the United States, including in the urban North, the Midwest, and elsewhere. This course will answer the questions: did the Civil Rights Movement really just happen in the South? What was happening in other parts of the country? What made local movements similar or different? How can we use these movement histories to understand how we got to where we are today?