African American History

Catalog description

This course examines African American history from the seventeenth century to the second half of the twentieth century. In this course, students will be able to follow a people in motion, from their forced migration and enslavement to literary explorations and social justice movements. We will focus on ideas of race and the complex nature of race relations throughout these periods. By looking at the writings of Langston Hughes to the organizing drives of Ella Baker, and from the trans-Atlantic peregrinations of W. E. B. Dubois to the gender and race crossings of Pauli Murray, this class presents African Americans in late nineteenth and twentieth century United States history as those who moved – by choice and by force – and who moved others. Rather than a tangent to the American story, African American history is treated as a central strand in the reunification, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization of the United States. Through a lens of motion, students will examine change and continuity in the African American experience, the fight against Jim Crow, the Great Migrations, the struggle for civil rights, and post-civil rights economic, political, social, and cultural developments and challenges.