Reading Response Assignment

EYES ON THE PRIZE

AFAM B201 – Intro to African American Studies

Najmah Thomas, Ph.D.

Agenda

 Admin & Module To-do List

 Timeline

 Eyes on the Prize (EOTP): Episode 1 Recap

 Opening Discussion

 EOTP Episode 2:

 Fighting Back

 Enforcing Brown

 Separate & Unequal…outside of the South

2

Admin / Module To-Do List

 Reading:

 Week 1a Reading –Eyes on The Prize Study Guide –

Episode 2

 Week 1b Reading – Eyes on The Prize Study Guide –

Episode 3

 Learning Module 4 Quiz (due EOD 10/19)

 Reading Response Assignment (due EOD 10/23)

 AASA club meeting today 6:15pm

African American Studies: Timeline of selected events (1917 – 1968)

1917-18 - US intervenes in World War I

1919 - 'Red Summer' - over 25 documented urban race riots in Chicago, DC

and other cities

1920 - 19th Amendment (women's right to vote)

1920s - The Harlem Renaissance - NYC, Chicago, Detroit, etc.,

experience similar explosion of creative Black

culture; 1929 - Great Depression begins

1933-38 – NEW DEAL ERA

1937 - Zora Neale Hurston writes best-known novel,

Their Eyes Were Watching God, in seven weeks while studying religion in Haiti.

1939 - 1945 - WWII

1948 - President Harry Truman desegregates the

armed forces.

1948 - Beginning of Apartheid in South Africa

1952 - Briggs v. Elliot (Clarendon County, SC), first Supreme Court case in the US

to challenge segregation; 1954 - Supreme Court

outlaws segregated public schools in Brown v. Board of

Education.

1955 - 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American youth from Chicago, is brutally murdered for

flirting with a white woman four days earlier. Vietnam

War begins.

1955-57 - Bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama,

sparked by seamstress Rosa Parks and organized by Rev.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Civil Rights Act of 1957 - protect voting rights.

1956 - Septima P. Clark fired from teaching job for

refusal to renounce the NAACP as required by SC

1958 – Orangeburg Massacre – 3 students killed,

28 wounded at SCSU

1960 - 4 NC A&T students stage sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro,

North Carolina, sparking other sit-ins across the south; (May) Civil Rights Act of

1960 - protect voting rights.

1962 - James Meredith enrolls at University of

Mississippi after President John F. Kennedy sends in

troops.

1963 - (August) - Over 250,000 attend March on Washington; MLK “I Have a Dream” speech.

(September) Images of violence in Birmingham, Al. (4 girls die in

church bomb, police brutality, etc.) result in widespread sympathy for

the Civil Rights Movement.

1963 - (November 22) President John F. Kennedy

assassinated.

Nation of Islam membership reaches 30,000 (from 500)

under leadership of Malcolm X.

1964 - Students Michael Schwerner, Andrew

Goodman and James Chaney are murdered

during Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

1964 - (July) President Lyndon Johnson signs

sweeping Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination.

(October) MLK wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

1965 - (March) MLK leads a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in support of black voter

registration; (August) Voting Rights Act of 1965

- abolish literacy tests.

1965 (February 24) Malcolm X assassinated.

(August) President Johnson signs Voting Rights Act.

1966 - New leader of the Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Stokely Carmichael coins the term 'Black Power"

1968 - (2/8) Orangeburg Massacre - students Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith, and Delano Middleton (still in high

school) killed by police gunfire on the campus of

South Carolina State College.

1968 (April 4) - King assassinated, sparking riots

in more than 100 cities.

1968 - End of the "Great Migration" (over 6 million African Americans left the

south for points north & west)

RECAP: EOTP Episode 1– Awakenings

Brown v. Board of Education

“To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely

because of their race generates a feeling of

inferiority as to their status in the community that may

affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be

undone.”

-Chief Justice Warren (unanimous opinion of the SCOTUS)

RECAP: EOTP Episode 1– Awakenings

 Brown v. Board of Education (May 17, 1954)

 Overturns separate but equal doctrine, sets the stage for direct action

 The murder of Emmett Till (August 28, 1955)

 Galvanizes the attention of a broader audience

 The Montgomery Bus Boycott (December 1955- December 1956)

 Propels a moment and a young leader into a movement

Image source: Cecil

Williams SC Civil

Rights Museum

Opening Discussion

EOTP Episode 2 – Fighting Back

 a legal or political process of ending laws, policies and practices that require the separation and isolation of different racial and ethnic groups

 a social process in which members of different racial and ethnic groups experience fair and equal treatment, within desegregated environments

Desegregation Integration

EOTP Link 9

EOTP Episode 2 – Fighting Back

 The African American community rejects “separate but equal” education:

 1956, Autherine Lucy enrolled in the all- white University of Alabama

 1957, Little Rock Nine (Central High School, AK)

 1958, Orangeburg Massacre (SCSU, SC)

 Segregationists respond with ‘massive resistance’:

 Elected officials respond with defiance, tacit approval for mob-like atmosphere

 White Citizens Councils

 Criminalizing protestors, evicting sharecroppers, voting to defund and/or close schools

 Terror, bombings

EOTP Episode 2 – Enforcing Brown

 Enforcing Brown v. Board of Education decision:

 First-person accounts from Little Rock 9, James Meredith, other students

 Why were schools the ‘touch point’ for desegregation?

 What is the difference between integration and desegregation??

Separate & unequal…outside of the

South

“When we would go to white schools, we’d see these lovely classrooms, with a small number of children in each class…the teachers were permanent. We’d see

wonderful materials. When we’d go to our schools, we would see overcrowded classrooms, children sitting out in the corridors, and so forth. And so, then we decided

that where there were a large number of white students, that’s where the care went. That’s where the

books went. That’s where the money went.”

-Ruth Batson; Boston, MA mother of 3, civil-rights activist

Separate & unequal…outside of the

South

 White backlash, opposition to school integration

 Segregation by law vs segregation by ‘racial imbalance’

 Examples of organized resistance to school desegregation in NY (1957), Detroit (1960), Boston (1960s onward)

 “White parents and politicians framed their resistance to school desegregation in terms like “busing” and “neighborhood schools,” and this rhetorical shift allowed them to support white schools and neighborhoods without using explicitly racist language.” –EOTP, ep2

The Soiling

of Old

Glory,

by Stanley

Forman in

Boston

Please be sure to read Eyes on the Prize – Episode

3 before class the next session!

Next Session: Thursday, October

19th - 4:30pm

Group Discussion

1. Is segregation and “racial imbalance” the same thing? Do they have the same outcomes?

2. What can we do to mitigate the negative impacts of “racial imbalance” in our society??