Prospect Park
Description
Greg Young and Tom Meyers follow the 19th-century creation and development of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had previously designed Central Park.
The Modern Civil Rights Movement: A River of Purposeful Anger
Question
Did individual African American activists spark the Civil Rights Movement?
Textbook Excerpt
Textbooks are silent about defining race and racism, even though the modern Civil Rights Movement and its antecedent movements were efforts to challenge and eliminate racism. Rather than addressing the outrage of systematically being denied basic human rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, while citizens in a democracy, textbooks suggest that individual African Americans were merely sad or angry because individual white people did not want to fight wars, play baseball, learn, ride public transportation or eat lunch with them.
Source Excerpt
The most important lessons of the modern Civil Rights Movement will not be gained from passively reading textbooks. Examining primary sources will place students closer to the scenes of the modern Civil Rights Movement and its antecedent movements. Too often Dr. King is represented in textbooks as the person who was sent to save African Americans from racism, or the most powerful leader of the modern Civil Rights Movement, or as a political moderate. Instead, he was one of many powerful leaders.
Historian Excerpt
Textbooks define segregation benignly with little reference to the ways in which northern and southern state governments and businesses systematically – and over the course of several decades -- reinforced an ideology of white supremacy through violence. Other groups of people affected by these same laws and practices – including American Indians, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans, Jews and Arabs – are seldom included in textbook discussions of racism. These absences strip away the underlying motivation for collective anger and social action.
Abstract
Textbooks present the modern Civil Rights Movement in the same way as other U.S. social movements -- a spontaneous, emotional eruption of saintly activists led by two or three inspired orators in response to momentary aberrations in the exercise of democracy. In particular, textbooks imply that, until World War II, African Americans had been relatively content with social, economic, and political conditions in the U.S. Then, suddenly, African Americans were angered that they could not fight on battlefields, play baseball, attend schools, or sit on buses with whites. Further, African Americans were the only people to observe and protest these conditions. Finally, to act on their discontent, African Americans required instructions from a benevolent federal government, or a single charismatic or sympathetic leader. A more accurate telling of the story of the modern Civil Rights Movement indicates that the “river of purposeful anger” has been long, wide and well populated.
The modern Civil Rights Movement is often marked as beginning with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school segregation or the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in Montgomery, AL and ends with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act or with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 (Or, more recently, with the election of President Barack Obama). In some textbooks, the context for this movement are the years following the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy V.
Civil Rights Sit-in
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Question
When did the Jackson, Mississippi sit-in take place? Was it before or after Woolworth's ended its segregation?
Answer
The practice of segregated seating at Woolworth’s lunch counters gained national headlines after the Greensboro (NC) sit-ins of 1960. Woolworth’s declared it would continue to abide by its official policy of following “local custom” (i.e. segregated seating in the South). Even as they reported “progress” from time to time in the number of integrated stores in the Woolworth’s chain, they did not abandon the “local custom” policy.
On May 28, 1963, civil rights activists staged a sit-in at the Jackson, Mississippi Woolworth’s lunch counter to protest its segregated seating. There were, at first, two African American women and one African American man from nearby Tougaloo College who took a seat at the lunch counter. They were later joined five other Tougaloo students and professors, white and black. The protestors were attacked by a white mob that punched, spat, screamed obscenities, poured hot coffee, syrup, salt, pepper, and mustard over the protestors until the police, who had been standing idly by, moved in. The vivid pictures from the event turned a local protest into a mass movement against segregation in Jackson.
The sit-in galvanized Jackson’s black community and caught the attention of the Kennedy Administration. Two weeks later, one of the movement’s leaders, Medgar Evers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a World War II veteran, was murdered in Jackson by local Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith, putting even greater pressure on local leaders and the Kennedy Justice Department to ease tensions. The Kennedy Administration helped broker an agreement between local African American leaders and the mayor’s office to promote a few black city workers and to hire a small number of black police officers to patrol their own neighborhoods. In return, the local leadership of the black community agreed to call off protests and demonstrations, much to the chagrin of younger African American activists.
Hoping to avoid further disturbances, the owner of the Jackson Woolworth’s closed the lunch counter shortly after the sit-in. Public accommodations in Jackson remained segregated until passage of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. Woolworth officials at that time announced that the company would “now be able to serve all its customers in all its stores on a desegregated basis.”
For more information
Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Bantam Dell, 2004.
International Civil Rights Center and Museum
Pitrone, Jean Maddern. F. W. Woolworth and the American Five and Dime: A Social History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2007.
Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement *for iconic images of the sit in scroll to the bottom half of the page*
Bibliography
Civil Rights in America: Racial Desegregation of Public Accommodations. The National Historic Landmarks, Cultural Resources, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. (accessed December 1, 2010).
Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
“Jackson Seizes 19 in Racial Protest.” New York Times, May 30, 1963.
“Woolworth Posts Sales Gain, Defends Exclusion of Negroes.” New York Times, May 19, 1960.
Wright, Gavin. “Southern Business and Public Accommodations: An Economic-Historical Paradox.” Paper presented at Business History Conference, Sacramento, California, April, 2008.
“3 In Sit-In Beaten At Jackson Store.” New York Times, May 29, 1963.
The Malcolm X Project
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This site is dedicated to the study of the life and legacy of Malcolm X. Only one of three "initiatives" is publicly available (Columbia faculty, staff, and students may also access the site's "multi-media study environment" section). "Oral histories," "outreach," and "Malcolm X biography project" are under construction. A chronology traces Malcolm's life from his birth in May 1925 to his assassination in February 1965, with short entries on major events. "Government Documents" offers FBI files on Malcolm X—4,000 pages of surveillance reports—covering the period 1954 to 1964. A brief summary accompanies each report and the files can be searched by keyword. The site's project journal, focusing on particular themes and issues, has seven articles on Malcolm X and eight weblog postings. Additionally, the site offers an e-seminar "Life after Death: Malcolm X and American Culture" by Columbia professor Dr. Manning Marble for a fee (available free to Columbia faculty, staff, and students). When this site is completed, it will be a good starting point for researching the ideas and life of Malcolm X.
Seattle Black Panther Party History and Memory Project
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In 1968, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense established a chapter in Seattle, one of the first outside of California. This website, devoted to portraying the history and collecting the memories of that chapter, is "the most extensive online collection of materials" for any Black Panther Party chapter. It includes 13 oral histories and brief biographies of key Black Panther Party members, 53 photographs documenting Black Panther events in the late 1960s, more than 100 news stories covering Party activities from 1968 to 1981 (four years after the Party was dissolved), testimony and exhibits from the 1970 Congressional Hearings investigating the Party, and all five issues of the Seattle Black Panther Party "Bulletin." A "Slide Show" highlighting some of these materials is a good place to begin for those unfamiliar with Black Panther Party history.
This website is part of the larger Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, which provides extensive materials that can serve as historical context, such as a guide to civil rights groups from the 1910s to the 1970s, 14 2,000-word essays on the ethnic press in Seattle, 13 other "Special Sections" on topics such as segregation in Seattle, and 37 in-depth essays on historical topics such as the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. In addition, a "For Teachers" section provides eight lesson plans using the website's material for middle and high school students.
Oxford African American Studies Center
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(Note: This website is now subscription-only.)
Designed for students, scholars, and librarians, this site provides access to thousands of primary source documents, maps, images, bibliographic entries, and subject entries drawn from reference resources in African American studies. Six published volumes furnish the majority of the resources: the Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-1895; Black Women in America, Second Edition; Africana, a five-volume history of the African and African American experience; the African American National Biography project, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; the Encyclopedia of African American Art and Architecture; and the Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature.
These sources present a wealth of primary source documents, more than 1,000 images, and close to 100 maps, which illustrate events from 1500s South America through the Clinton Presidency. The site also includes more than 5,000 biographies and 3,000 subject entries on events and people, such as 19th-century African American midwives in the Western United States, prominent abolitionists, and charts on African American professional baseball. Useful for research, reference, and class projects on all aspects of African American history.
Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power
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This website is a companion to the PBS show on Rob Williams and the Black Power movement. Rob Williams was "the first African American civil rights leader to advocate armed resistance to racial oppression and violence." His radio program for blacks in the South "Radio Free Dixie," broadcast from exile in Cuba, "included cutting-edge music by African American artists, news from the front lines of the black freedom movement and fiery editorials by Rob Williams that railed against 'rump-licking Uncle Toms' and 'Ku Klux Klan savages.'"
The site offers a description of the film along with the film trailer. It also includes a short biography of Rob Williams with several images, as well as background information on "Radio Free Dixie" with ten audio clips including four excerpts from the show and six music clips. "Learn more" includes links to 12 related websites and six books on Black Power, Radio Free Dixie, Rob Williams, and black revolutionaries. A good starting point for research on Williams and his role in the Black Power movement.
Finishing the Dream: Learning from the Civil Rights Era
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This subsection of the NBC Learn website offers 132 streaming short videos related to the civil rights movement.
Videos include commentaries following major events (closely or years in retrospect), original testimonies, and video of events such as the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Topics include Emmett Till, bus boycotts, Brown v. Board of Education, the Freedom Riders, Little Rock, African American attendance at the University of Mississippi, Medgar Evers, the March on Washington, the Birmingham Church Bombing, Malcolm X, 1964 voter registration volunteer disappearances, and King's assassination.
The last section, Finishing the Dream, contains footage from four town hall events, which brought together activists, educators, religious leaders, and high school and college students for discussion of issues related to the civil rights movement.
The 132 videos are divided into subsections by year, beginning with 1954 and continuing through 1968. All videos include a transcript. Select the clip, and the word "transcript" will appear to the right of the video. Click it to bring up a scrollable transcript alongside the film.
You may also be interested in exploring further on the NBC Learn website. However, the majority of the content is subscription-based. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial, though, in order to test the waters.
Faces of Science: African Americans in the Sciences
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This site contains biographical profiles of over 200 African American men and women who have contributed to the advancement of science and engineering. The site provides brief (roughly 250 word) biographies of scholars from fields such as biology, chemistry, physics, zoology, and veterinary medicine, as well as inventors. Among the scientists included in the site are prominent figures like George Washington Carver, scientist and inventor of numerous industrial applications for agricultural products, and astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker.
Each entry also includes a bibliography of sources for further biographical information. The site is indexed by scientist name and profession, and there are special sections for the biographies of 20 women scientists and 14 of the first African Americans to receive PhDs in science. Though there are no primary documents on this site, it is a good place to find general information on prominent African American scientists throughout American history.
Dox Thrash: An African American Master Printmaker Rediscovered
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The art of Dox Thrash (1893-1965) is exhibited in more than 60 images—mostly reproductions of his prints, but also including drawings and photographs of the artist at work. Born in Griffin, GA, Thrash spent most of his life in Philadelphia, which he expressively documented in his artworks. The exhibit proceeds along a timeline from birth to death that allows visitors to read a biographical narrative placing his life in appropriate historical context and to view images relevant to each period. Texts and images also can be downloaded in PDF format. Thrash's prints illuminated aspects of African American community life in Philadelphia with scenes of street life, workers, domestic scenes, and leisure activities. Thrash also portrayed scenes drawn from his experience as a soldier in World War I, life on the road, and the lynching of blacks.
In addition to his artistic creations, Thrash invented a new and influential printmaking technique—the carborundum process—in the 1930s as he worked in the WPA Graphic Arts Workshop. The exhibit provides descriptions and images of nine techniques Thrash used, and also includes four audio files of the curator discussing the process of putting the exhibit together. Valuable for students of the history of art and for those interested in expressive depictions of African American life and culture in Philadelphia.