HIS 200: Applied History
Southern New Hampshire University
6-4 Short Responses
June 9, 2020
Week 6 Short Responses – Question 1
Which source will you analyze using active reading strategies? Include the name of the
article, the author, the publication, the date, and where you found it.
Read your chosen source using the active reading strategies you learned on the previous page.
Then, summarize the overall meaning and content of the reading. Write your summary below.
Your summary should be at least one paragraph long.
Answer:
Week 6 Short Responses – Question 2
What events or historical forces contributed to the Boston busing crisis of the mid-1970s?
Name at least three, and briefly explain why you think each one was a contributory cause of
the Boston busing crisis.
Answer:
Answer:
Answer:
Week 6 Short Responses – Question 3 Name three specific consequences of the Boston
busing crisis.
Answer:
Answer:
Answer:
Week 6 Short Responses – Question 4
Describe one cause of the event you have chosen for your historical analysis (keeping in
mind that there are many), and explain one piece of evidence from your research that you will
use to support this assertion. Describe one consequence of the event, and explain one piece of
evidence from your research that you will use to support this assertion.
Answer:
Theme: Analyzing History
Overview
When it's done right, an historical essay can read like a mystery novel. Trying to figure out what really
happened in the distant past requires us to search for clues (primary sources) and listen to expert
witnesses (secondary sources). But in the end, all that historical evidence doesn't speak for itself; it's up
to the historian to make sense of things.
That's what we mean by historical analysis.
In Theme: Analyzing History, we'll see how
historians sift and assess the evidence to come up
with—and then refine—their thesis statement and
message. Because historical research is an
ongoing process, so too is the process of thesis
development. In Theme: Analyzing History,
you'll have an opportunity to revise your thesis
statement to reflect research you've conducted
since turning in your writing plan.
The thesis, of course, is just the jumpingoff point
for the historical essay you're working on
throughout this course. Like a good mystery
(Click icon for citation)
novelist, you've also got to give your readers the
lay of the land, with an overview that provides
them with background information and relevant historical context.
Another important part of the historian's job is showing how different historical forces and events relate
to each other. In this theme, we'll explore the historical concept of contingency, which stresses the
interconnectedness of historical events and the difficulty of predicting future outcomes.
Finally, you need to show how the evidence supports your thesis. That's the essence of historical
analysis: choosing the most compelling evidence and interpreting it in the most convincing way, to build
the strongest possible argument for your thesis. In this theme, you'll see how historians construct an
analysis and begin the process of building one yourself.
Course Outcome
After completing this theme, you should be able to:
Utilize historical evidence in drawing conclusions about the impact of historic events on American
society
Copyright © 2017 MindEdge Inc. All rights reserved. Duplication prohibited.
Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 5-1: The Struggle for Civil
Rights
The Struggle for Civil Rights
From the earliest colonial days, American history has been haunted by the specter of African slavery.
Even after its legal abolition in 1865 America's "original sin," as James Madison first called it, lived on
through a deeply entrenched system of legal, social, and economic discrimination against African
Americans. (Madison, 1820)
The movement to overturn that systemic discrimination has been
ongoing for more than 150 years. The most blatant form of racial
discrimination—the system of de jure segregation enacted in the
South, which legally required the discriminatory treatment of African
Americans—was essentially abolished by federal legislation, including
the Voting Rights Act, in the 1960s. But the problem of de facto
segregation has long been a fact of life not only in the South but
throughout the nation.
(Click icon for citation)
It continued—in the segregated schools of cities such as Boston, and
the segregated housing markets of cities such as Chicago and Los
Angeles—long after the legal and political battles of the modern Civil
Rights Movement had ended. While African Americans, as a group,
have made significant gains in income and educational attainment over
the last 50 years, de facto segregation continues to affect many aspects
of American life. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012; National Center for
Education Statistics, 2012)
In this theme, we will focus on the modern Civil Rights Movement,
looking at efforts to affirm and expand AfricanAmerican rights in two specific areas that have been
central to the overall civil rights struggle: voting and public education. The fight to end the
disenfranchisement of AfricanAmerican voters and secure their right to vote, free from intimidation and
legal obstruction, culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The struggle to
desegregate public schools and win equal educational opportunities for AfricanAmerican children—first
affirmed in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954)—has continued for
generations. In this theme, we will look specifically at the tumultuous and emotionally charged effort to
desegregate Boston's public schools in the mid1970s.
We will use these two case studies to examine the historical concept of contingency and to learn how to
use historical evidence to draw conclusions about the impact of historical events on American society,
through the process of historical analysis.
Learning Objectives
In this learning block, you will:
Review the historical context behind the struggle for civil rights for African Americans, the core
concept of this theme
Analyze the relationship between the following key approaches to studying history: research
question, historical evidence, and thesis statement
References
Madison,
J. (1820). Letter to the Marquis de Lafayette,
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/mss/mjm/19/19_0641_0643.pdf
November
25,
1820.
Retrieved
from
National Center for Education Statistics (2012). Fast Facts: Degrees Conferred by Sex and Race. Retrieved from
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
U.S.
Census
Bureau
(2012).
American
Community
http://blackdemographics.com/households/africanamericanincome/
Survey.
Retrieved
from
The Early Struggle for Civil Rights
The end of the Civil War brought the legal abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment, the first of the
three socalled Civil War Amendments. But the end of slavery did not bring equality for the former slaves.
While the southern states had to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment as a condition of their readmission to
the Union, most of them quickly enacted laws to close off opportunities to the newly freed slaves and
deny them the rights of citizenship. The postwar Black Codes—based on older southern laws that sought
to limit the freedoms of freed blacks in the years before the Civil War—barred African Americans from
voting, denied them most legal rights, and restricted their ability to find work outside of plantations.
Such laws laid the groundwork for the later Jim Crow laws, which institutionalized segregation in all
walks of life throughout the South. (Dunning, 1907)
In response to the Black Codes, Congress passed the Civil Rights
Act of 1866, which formally made African Americans citizens.
To further safeguard the citizenship rights of the freed slaves,
Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified
in 1868. The Reconstruction Acts, passed in 1867 and 1868,
essentially placed the southern states under military rule for a
decade, allowing for a brief period in which freed African
Americans in the South enjoyed political rights.
The profound significance of the Fourteenth Amendment was
that, through its Equal Protection and Due Process clauses, it
prohibited the states from abridging the rights and liberties
guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution. In reality,
however, for African Americans through the end of the 19th
century (and well beyond), the promise of equal protection and
due process went unrealized. The southern states flouted the
Fourteenth Amendment, and the Supreme Court refused to
interpret it as making the Bill of Rights binding on the states.
(Foner, 1988)
The house in Atlanta where Martin
Luther King Jr. was born is now part
of the Martin Luther King Jr. National
Historic Site. (Click icon for citation)
The Black Codes also led Congress to pass the Fifteenth
Amendment (ratified in 1870), which guaranteed African
Americans the right to vote. It did so by decreeing that citizens'
right to vote could not be denied or abridged based on race, color,
or prior slave status. Despite the Fifteenth Amendment, southern states continued to deprive blacks of
their voting rights by imposing voterqualification restrictions (e.g., literacy tests and propertyownership
requirements) that effectively disenfranchised African Americans. (Valelly, 2009)
The Fifteenth Amendment divided the pioneering women's rights movement, which sought the franchise
for women as well as for African Americans. As we saw in Theme: Communicating Historical Ideas,
some leaders in the nascent woman suffrage movement opposed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment
because it did not also extend the voting right to women. Women did not gain the right to vote until
ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
Jim Crow Laws and the Segregated South
Unyielding southern resistance to black equality led Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
which prohibited racial segregation in public accommodations such as hotels, restaurants, and
transportation. It also barred the exclusion of African Americans from jury service. But when the federal
government ended its military occupation of the South in 1877, marking the end of Reconstruction, the
southern states further defied federal efforts to guarantee the civil rights of blacks. (Foner, 1988)
Southern state legislatures enacted Jim Crow laws,
which discriminated against African Americans by
requiring racial segregation of schools, restaurants,
hotels, theaters, and other public accommodations.
Under Jim Crow laws, the southern states created
separate facilities for whites and blacks in every walk
of life, covering all public accommodations. This
institutionalization of racebased separation throughout
the South, which endured for a hundred years after the
Civil War, was known as de jure segregation because
it was backed by law.
"Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal,
After Reconstruction, African Americans throughout
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1939. (Click icon for
the South faced state legal systems that denied them
citation)
equal justice and routinely violated their dueprocess
rights. The courts and law enforcement in the South abided lynching and other white mob violence
committed against blacks. And the federal courts, well into the 1900s, proved unwilling or unable to
uphold the civil rights of blacks. (Equal Justice Initiative, 2015)
Disenfranchisement Despite the Fifteenth Amendment
After Reconstruction, the southern states devised obstacles to block African Americans from voting
despite the Fifteenth Amendment, which decreed that the right to vote could not be denied on the basis of
race or color. To circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment's intent, southern states employed devices for
determining voter eligibility which, though not expressly racial, had the particular effect of
disenfranchising blacks, who were overwhelmingly poor and uneducated.
These devices included literacy tests, poll taxes (a tax paid
as a qualification for voting), and propertyownership
requirements. Many states in the South also imposed a so
called grandfather clause, which restricted voting to those
whose grandfathers had voted before Reconstruction (i.e.,
pre 1867). Grandfather clauses effectively denied the
descendants of slaves the right to vote. (Valelly, 2009) All
of these legally enacted devices represented forms of de jure
segregation—as opposed to de facto segregation, which
lacked the force of law.
A poll tax receipt. Image courtesy of the
African American Intellectual History
Society.
Black disenfranchisement continued in one form or another throughout the South for a century after the
Civil War.
Separate but Equal
Legal segregation in the South was validated by the Supreme Court in a landmark decision at the close of
the 1800s. Homer Plessy, an African American, defied a Louisiana segregation law by riding in a "whites
only" railroad car. He was arrested when he refused to move to a car reserved for blacks as mandated by
the state law. Plessy challenged the constitutionality of the law on the grounds that segregation violated
the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court rejected this challenge, ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that state laws requiring
racial segregation in public facilities are constitutional if the facilities are "separate but equal." The
Court's decision ignored the fact that most facilities available to African Americans were not equal but
vastly inferior; nonetheless, Plessy and the doctrine of "separate but equal" remained the law of the land
for more than half a century. (Medley, 2003)
References
Dunning, W. (1907). Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 18651877. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Equal Justice Initiative (2015). Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. Retrieved from
http://www.eji.org/lynchinginamerica
Foner, E. (1988). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 18631877. New York: Harper & Row.
Medley, K. (2003). We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson: The Fight Against Legal Segregation. Gretna, LA: Pelican
Publishing.
Valelly, R. (2009). The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
U.S.
Census
Bureau
(2012).
American
Community
http://blackdemographics.com/households/africanamericanincome
Survey.
Retrieved
from
The Struggle for Civil Rights, 1900 – 1950
The first half of the 20th century saw limited progress in the fight to secure the civil rights of African
Americans. Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute and the leading figure in the
AfricanAmerican community in the early 1900s, was an outspoken proponent of black education and
entrepreneurship. But Washington was criticized within the AfricanAmerican community for his
strategic decision not to challenge Jim Crow laws and the disenfranchisement of black voters directly.
More militant AfricanAmerican leaders, including W.E.B. DuBois and Ida
Wells, founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) in 1909, with the mission of actively fighting against racial
prejudice. The organization focused in its early years largely on efforts to
prevent lynchings in the South and on mounting legal challenges to Jim
Crow legislation. (Finch, 1981)
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1918.
(Click icon for citation)
The return of thousands of AfricanAmerican veterans of World War I
highlighted the huge divide between America's rhetorical commitment to
democracy and individual freedom and the reality of segregation,
disenfranchisement, and antiblack violence in the South. This gave rise to
the New Negro movement, which sparked the larger cultural and intellectual
movement known as the Harlem Renaissance (Gates, H.L., 1988)
Beginning shortly before World War I, the Great Migration
saw an estimated six million African Americans move from
the deep South to the North, Midwest, and West over the
next 60 years. Fleeing segregation and poverty, many of
these African Americans found work in industrial cities
such as Chicago, Detroit, and Gary, Indiana. While many
African Americans had previously been suspicious of
organized labor, A. Philip Randolph, head of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, became the leading
voice for black workers within the labor movement. As the
number of African Americans working in industrial jobs
swelled, organized labor became increasingly outspoken in
its advocacy for black workers' rights; in the 1950s and
1960s, labor would be a powerful ally of the civil rights
movement. (Lemann, 1992)
The Lafayette Theatre, Harlem, 1936. (Click
icon for citation)
The Great Depression of the 1930s hit African Americans disproportionally hard; the collapse of cotton
prices drove thousands of Southern sharecroppers to the brink (Thompson and Clarke, 1935), and the
scarcity of factory jobs led to increased racial tensions in Northern industrial cities. The unemployment
rate among African Americans was estimated to exceed 50 percent—more than twice the rate among
whites. (Wolters, 1970)
African Americans, traditionally supporters of the Republican Party because of its historical opposition
to slavery, were initially skeptical of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, who had won the Presidency with
strong backing from the South. Early New Deal programs were not aimed toward the AfricanAmerican
community, and some, such as the Federal Housing Authority, initially reinforced existing patterns of
segregation. But other programs, such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian
Conservation Corps, provided jobs to substantial numbers of African Americans, especially in the North.
By the end of the decade, many African Americans in the North were strongly behind the New Deal, and
urban black voters began a major shift that would eventually make them an integral part of the
Democratic electoral coalition. (Reed, 2008)
America's entry into World War II effectively ended the Depression, as factories geared up for the war
effort. At the same, time, more than a million African Americans joined the armed forces; when they
returned from war in 1945, they embodied the argument that African Americans were entitled to the
same freedoms for which America had fought in Europe and the Pacific. (Taylor, 2014)
While resistance to the campaign for AfricanAmerican civil rights was still deeply entrenched, the late
1940s saw a couple of notable victories: Jackie Robinson famously broke baseball's "Color Line" in
1947, and in 1948, President Harry S Truman issued an executive order that desegregated the U.S.
military. While these breakthroughs were largely symbolic, more substantive gains were just over the
horizon.
References
Finch, M. (1981). The NAACP: Its Fight for Justice. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1981.
Gates, H. L. (1988). "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black."
Representations, Vol. 24 (Fall 1988), 129155.
Lemann, N. (1992) The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York:
Vintage Books.
Reed, A. (2008). "Race and the New Deal Coalition." The Nation, April 7, 2008.
Taylor, C. (2014). Patriotism Crosses the Color Line: African Americans in World War II. Retrieved from
http://www.gilderlehrman.org/historybyera/worldwarii/essays/patriotismcrossescolorlineafrican
americansworldwarii
Thompson, I. and Clarke, L. (1935). "Ghost Town—Almost: The Depression Hits a Negro Town." Opportunity,
Journal of Negro Life, Vol. 13, No. 9, 277.
Wolters, R. (1970) Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Publishing Group.
The Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1954 – 1968
The NAACP's strategy of mounting legal challenges to Jim Crow laws had produced minor gains in the
first decades of the 20th century. In 1938, the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP in ruling that states
that provide a law school for whites had to provide instate legal education to African Americans as well.
And in 1944, the Court struck down the "white primary" system that effectively barred African
Americans from voting in Democratic primaries in the South.
The greatest victory, however, came in a case involving public
elementary and secondary schools. In Brown v. Board of
Education (1954), the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that
"separate educational facilities are inherently unequal"—
overturning Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and ushering in an intense
period of activism that would, within a generation, tear down the
facade of legal segregation. (Cottrol et al, 2004)
Because of the magnitude of the Brown decision, many scholars
consider 1954 to mark the beginning of the modern Civil Rights
Movement. During the roughly 15 years following Brown, a wide
range of AfricanAmerican leaders and organizations sought to
galvanize American public opinion—and, as a result, political
will—against the structures of de jure segregation in the South:
segregated schools, "whites only" lunch counters and restrooms,
and separate "colored" sections on public buses, to name only a
few.
The movement's tools were civil disobedience and nonviolent
protests, including boycotts, sitins, and protest marches. Very
often, nonviolent civil rights protesters met with violence at the
hands of Southern law enforcement officers and civilians; some
of these confrontations were covered on the network television
news, and the images of police brutally beating peaceful
protesters helped generate public sympathy and support for the
cause of civil rights. (Bodroghkozy, 2012)
Thurgood Marshall, NAACP's chief
counsel, who argued the case before
the Supreme Court for the plaintiffs.
(Click icon for citation)
The modern Civil Rights Movement addressed a wide range of issues. While its immediate focus was on
the South—the states of the former Confederacy, where segregation actually had the force of law—the
movement sought to confront racial prejudice and injustice throughout American society.
Public Education
The Supreme Court's Brown decision outlawed segregation
in America's public schools, but the process of school
desegregation proved to be difficult, drawnout, and highly
confrontational. In 1957, the governor of Arkansas called
out the National Guard to prevent nine AfricanAmerican
students from enrolling at Central High School in Little
Rock. President Eisenhower ordered troops of the 101st
Airborne to escort the students to school, but a year later,
the state closed all four high schools in the city, rather than
integrate them. A year would pass before the Supreme Court
ordered the schools reopened. (Bates, 1962.)
James Meredith, escorted by U.S. marshals,
integrated the University of Mississippi.
(Click icon for citation)
In 1962, the governor of Mississippi refused to allow an
AfricanAmerican war veteran, James Meredith, to enroll at
the University of Mississippi. President Kennedy
intervened, ordering 500 U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to
class; thousands of white protesters responded with a riot
that killed two people and injured more than 300, including
166 marshals and 40 soldiers. A similar but less violent
confrontation took place at the University of Alabama in
1963, when President Kennedy had to federalize the
Alabama National Guard and order the troops to enforce the
integration order.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
One of the seminal moments of the modern Civil Rights
Movement occurred in 1955, when Rosa Parks, an African
American seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give
up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Parks was arrested, and
the city's AfricanAmerican community responded with a year
long boycott of the Montgomery bus system; the confrontation
made Parks a civil rights heroine and catapulted a young local
minister, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to national prominence.
The Montgomery boycott resulted in a legal victory: the Supreme
Court ruled, in Browder v. Gayle (1956), that segregation in
Montgomery's bus system was unconstitutional, and after the
court issued its desegregation order, the boycott was declared
over on December 20, 1956. But this victory was shortlived, as
white supremacists soon responded by shooting at African
American bus riders and firebombing black churches. By 1963,
most black Montgomerians had returned to the preboycott
practice of riding only in the back of the bus. (Silberman, 1964)
Rosa Parks with Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., 1955. (Click icon for
citation)
Freedom Rides
A few years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1961, civil rights activists organized a series of
"Freedom Rides" designed to end segregation on interstate buses traveling to the segregated South. The
plan was to integrate seating patterns on the buses, to do away with "white" and "colored" sections, and
to integrate all bus facilities—including terminals, restrooms, water fountains, and lunch counters. The
Freedom Riders included whites from the North, including many college students, as well as African
Americans from the South; most were recruited by CORE, though the SNCC was also involved. They
met fierce resistance; scores were injured during riots in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, and
more than 300 were arrested and imprisoned for more than five weeks in Jackson, Mississippi. As public
support for the Freedom Riders grew, President Kennedy ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission
to fully desegregate all aspects of interstate bus travel. (McMillen, 1977)
Voting Rights
The legal structures erected to prevent African Americans from voting—including poll taxes, literacy
tests, and residency requirements—were arguably most formidable in Mississippi. Efforts to register
African Americans to vote were routinely suppressed, and electionrelated violence against African
Americans was common.
When local civil rights activists began a voter registration
campaign in 1961, it was met with violent repression by
police and white citizens, widespread arrests, and the
murder of one voting activist. The situation was so dire that
a broad coalition of civil rights groups—many of which had
previously seen themselves as competitors—came together
to mount a massive joint effort. By the mid1960s, voting
registration drives were underway in virtually every
Southern state.
One such drive was part of the Mississippi Freedom
Summer of 1964, a campaign in which roughly a thousand
mostly white college students joined with local African
American activists to register voters, teach in "Freedom
Schools," and engage in political organizing. In late June,
three young civil rights workers disappeared; their bodies
were discovered weeks later, but it would be more than 40
years before anyone was convicted in their murders.
While the Mississippi Freedom Summer did not, in the end,
register a great many AfricanAmerican voters, public
outrage over the murders helped to generate support for the
cause of voting rights and contributed to the eventual
passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. (Watson, 2010)
A poster asking for the public's help in
finding three young civil rights workers—
Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and
Michael Schwerner—who disappeared
during the Mississippi Freedom Summer.
Their bodies were discovered in August
1964. (Click icon for citation)
The March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, close to 300,000
demonstrators joined in the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a historic
gathering put together by most of the major civil
rights organizations, progressive labor unions,
and other liberal groups. With network television
cameras carrying the event live, Martin Luther
King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream"
speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and the
civil rights movement had its most iconic
moment.
The March's primary purpose was to call for
passage of new civil rights legislation that
President Kennedy had proposed; after the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Joachim Prinz pictured, 1963.
March, King and other civil rights leaders met
(Click icon for citation)
with Kennedy at the White House. At that point,
however, it appeared that Kennedy did not have
the votes in Congress to win passage of the bill. It was only after his assassination the following
November in Dallas—and the determination of his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to win passage of the bill
in part as a memorial to the slain Kennedy—that the Civil Rights Act would become the law of the land.
(Civil Rights Veterans, 2016))
Fair Housing
In the mid1960s, civil rights leaders began to focus on the issue of housing discrimination. Efforts to
outlaw racebased discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of housing met with extremely strong
resistance, at least in part because this was an issue that affected more than just Southern racists in the
old Confederacy: ending housing discrimination would have an impact on homeowners and landlords in
every part of the country.
Proposals for Fair Housing legislation languished in Congress until 1968. In March, the Kerner
Commission—appointed by President Johnson in response to a series of race riots in major cities during
the summer of 1967—called for a sweeping new housing law to help improve conditions in urban areas.
A month later Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and major riots broke out in cities
across the country. Congress responded quickly by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which including
strong fairhousing provisions. This was the last major piece of legislation passed during the modern
Civil Rights Movement. (Ricks, 2013)
Fifty years after the fact, societal perceptions of the modern civil rights movement tend to focus on a few
heroic figures, such as Rosa Parks, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Medgar Evers. And many students
who did not live through the era may assume that the movement itself was unified and had a clearcut
agenda.
In fact, there were many prominent civil rights leaders, not all of whom agreed at any given time. And
there were a multitude of civil rights organizations; the socalled Big Four included the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and the NAACP, among many others. Some of these
groups were more inclined to compete with each other than to cooperate.
These groups had somewhat different agendas, with some more focused on voting rights, say, and others
more focused on housing and economic issues.
Nor did everyone in the movement agree on the
principle of nonviolent protest; some leaders,
such as Robert F. Williams of North Carolina,
believed strongly that African Americans needed
to arm themselves and fight back against anti
black violence. Other, more militant leaders, such
as Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam,
rejected the philosophy of nonviolence and
argued that African Americans should separate
themselves completely from whites.
While it is not accurate to say that the civil rights
movement had any one, single leader, it is
nonetheless clear that the movement began to
Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, at the
crumble after the assassination of Martin Luther
podium (right). At left is heavyweight champion
King in April 1968. The loss of King as an
Muhammad
Ali, then known as Cassius Clay. (Click
eloquent advocate of nonviolent protest definitely
icon for citation)
hurt the movement. And perhaps more important,
the wave of racial violence that convulsed many
cities in the wake of King's death shattered whatever fragile political consensus might have been forming
behind the idea of comprehensive reforms to address the root causes of racial discrimination and
AfricanAmerican poverty. (Garrow, 2004)
While the modern civil rights movement succeeded, in large measure, in bringing about the end of legal
segregation in the Old South, the problems of racism and inequality—the legacy of "America's original
sin"—have yet to be fully addressed.
References
Bates, D. (1987). The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir . Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press.
Bodroghkozy , A. (2012). Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement Champaign, IL: University of
Illinois Press.
Civil Rights Veterans (2016). The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Retrieved from
www.crmvet.org/tim/tim63b.htm#1963mow, May 25, 2016.
Cottrol, R. et al, (2004). The Legal Strategy That Brought Down "Separate but Equal" by Toppling School
Segregation. Retrieved from www.aft.org/periodical/americaneducator/summer2004/naacpvjimcrow
Garrow, D. (2004). Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
New York: William Morrow and Company.
Gates, H. L. (1988). "The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black."
Representations, Vol 24 (Fall 1988), 129155.
McMillen, N. (1977) "Black Enfranchisement in Mississippi: Federal Enforcement and Black Protest in the 1960s."
The Journal of Southern History Vol. 43, No.3, 351—72.
Ricks, C. (2013). A Tribute to Dr. King: Moving the Fair Housing Act Forward. Retrieved from
www.acslaw.org/acsblog/atributetodrkingmovingthefairhousingactforward0
Silberman, C. (1964). Crisis in Black and White. New York: Random House.
Watson, B. (2010). Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a
Democracy. New York: Penguin Books.
Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 5-2: Contingency and the
Civil Rights Movement
Historical Contingency
Contingency is the fourth of the "5 C's of Historical Thinking" that we first encountered back in Theme:
Approaches to History: Change, Context, Causality, Contingency, and Complexity.
To understand the concept of contingency, we need to think of a few more C's: the causes, course, and
consequences of a historical event. These three C's help us look at the interrelationship, or contingency,
between many historical events:
The causes of a historical event are previous events, all of which have a causal relationship with the
later event;
The course of a historical event consists of the many smaller events that make up the larger event;
the course of an event is implied by the beginning and ending dates that define the event. The course
of the modern Civil Rights Movement, for instance, consists of the many protests, demonstrations,
and other political and social events that defined the movement, from 1954 through 1968; and
The consequences of a historical event are the subsequent events that it, in turn, causes.
Learning Objectives
In this learning block, you will:
Explore the concept of historical contingency
Use historical contingency to help you assess the causes, course, and consequences of historical
events
Analyze the causes, course, and consequences of historical events
What Is Contingency?
Is history inevitable? Are the events of our time predetermined, incapable of being changed by anything
we do?
Ask those questions of a philosopher, a physicist, or a theologian, and you're likely to get some
interesting—and very convoluted—answers. But ask a historian, and what you'll hear is a clear and
simple NO.
One of the fundamental principles of history is the concept of contingency, the idea that each historical
event depends (or is contingent on) previous events. Change one of those previous events, and you may
change all the events that come after it. Or, to put it another way: history is not inevitable or
predetermined, because everything that happens today can have an impact on what happens tomorrow.
(Martin, 2016)
Contingency is an important concept because it shows us how interconnected history really is, and
because it requires us to explore those connections to understand the relative importance of different
historical events. Such explorations have led to a historical approach known as counterfactual history, in
which historians use "what if?" questions (known as counterfactual conditionals) to try to figure out
which events had a major impact on the course of history.
Not all historians believe counterfactual history is legitimate; as Martin Bunzl points out, a lot of
counterfactual history has no real grounding, and is based on speculation rather than historical evidence.
(Bunzl, 2004) And there's a real danger of slipping from counterfactual history into alternative history, a
literary genre that plays the what if? game for its entertainment value and is not a legitimate form of
historical scholarship.
Regardless of how you feel about counterfactual history, the concept of contingency is still an important
—and very useful—way to look at the relationship among different historical events.
References
Bunzl, M. (2004). "Counterfactual History: A User's Guide. "The American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 3, 845
858.
Martin, D. (2016). Contingency. Retrieved from teachinghistory.org/teachingmaterials/askamasterteacher/24118,
May 12, 2016.
Exercise: Thinking About Contingency
The following passage is from a chapter in the book Political Contingency: Studying the Unexpected, the
Accidental, and the Unforeseen. This chapter, by the political scientist David R. Mayhew, looks at the
impact of unforeseen events (such as, in the excerpt below, political assassinations) on the course of
American political history.
The passage below is excerpted from "Events as Causes: The Case of American Politics," pages 99 to
140. Click on the title of the article to access a PDF of the entire book; scroll down to page 99 and read
the entirety of Chapter 4. These readings are provided by the Shapiro Library. This reading is required.
You will have to log into Shapiro Library with your SNHU credentials to access this article.
A Word on Assassinations
I have skimped on brief or shortterm events, although there is no shortage of supremely important
instances. In 1865, for example, crucial to the Republicans' emergence as the country's main
opposition party were the socalled "Sack of Lawrence [Kansas]" by a proslavery mob and the
caning of Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor. "These two acts, one on top of the other,
traumatized the nation." In the 1960s, key to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 were the Birmingham and Selma confrontations—the police dogs and
the rest—that riveted national attention on deepsouthern practices courtesy of the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr., as impresario.
But assassination may deserve a special word. Not easily subjected to systematic treatment—they
are nearly in a category with the Nicaragua and Mexico earthquakes—they have been neglected as
causal factors....I do not want to take up familiar speculations here on the order of: what if Lincoln
had served out his full second term? I will stop at addressing two particularly energetic bouts of
national policymaking—in fact, possibly the two most consequential exercises of American
lawmaking since World War II.
One was the "Reagan Revolution" of 1981—that is, the Republicans' program of unprecedented tax
and spending cuts enacted that year...[A]s of March 1981 the plan seemed to be headed for the
rocks on Capitol Hill. Then John W. Hinckley, Jr. shot and nearly killed President Reagan. That
brought on a "display of jaunty courage" by the president (as in his "Honey, I forgot to duck!"),
which "turned Reagan into a national hero and immeasurably helped the passage of his fiscal
program." His survey ratings soared. "The legislative payoff was dramatic": Moderate and
conservative Democrats, hearing messages from home, signed on. The cuts were approved in a
series of showdown votes that spring and summer. All this is entirely believable. Without the
assassination episode: no Reagan Revolution.
The other was the Great Society—or, more broadly, the extraordinary harvest of legislation enacted
by a leftcentered coalition on Capitol Hill during calendar 1964 and in the wake of the 1964
election during 1965. President Kennedy's legislative record had been soso, but then he was
assassinated in November 1963. The impact was enormous, "All that Kennedy had tried to do, all
that he stood for, became in some sense sanctified." Lyndon Johnson took over the presidency with
a "Let us continue" appeal: "We would be untrue to the trust he reposed in us, if we did not remain
true to the tasks he relinquished when God summoned him." As the new president, Johnson
"possessed an enormous advantage that liberal predecessors had been denied since the late 1930s: a
national mood so eager for strong presidential leadership that even Congress and interest groups
had to take heed." That advantage owed chiefly to "the impact of Kennedy's assassination." It
helped make 1964 possibly the most productive legislative year since the 1930s....It is certainly
plausible that, given the strong impulse toward state expansion in the 1960s and 1970s in this
country and elsewhere, much of the content of the Great Society would have found its way into
American policy sooner or later anyway. But we cannot know how much or when, and quite
possibly a good deal of it would not have.
Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 5-3: The Struggle for Voting
Rights
The Struggle for Voting Rights
The Fifteenth Amendment, which specifically guaranteed the right of all male citizens to vote, regardless
of their "race, color, or previous condition of servitude," was ratified in February of 1870. Almost a
century later, the ability of African Americans to vote in many states—essentially, those of the Old
South—was routinely and sometimes violently thwarted.
The obstacles to AfricanAmerican voting that were erected over the course of the Jim Crow era were
formidable: poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright physical intimidation. In the 1960
Presidential election, according to estimates by the NAACP, only about a quarter of eligible African
Americans cast a ballot. That number increased sharply, to almost 60 percent, in 1964, but African
American turnout in the South—where most blacks were not even able to register to vote—remained
very low. (The New York Times, 2014)
Civil rights leaders had long recognized that safeguarding the right to vote was essential to expanding
AfricanAmerican rights in other spheres. But previous proposals to pass major votingrights legislation
—the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960—were watered down by Southern opponents in Congress and
proved largely ineffectual. (Bardolph, 1970)
In the wake of Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in the 1964 Presidential election, civil rights leaders
began a major push for a tough new votingrights law. Johnson was sympathetic to their cause but wary
of the political implications of a major fight for new civil rights legislation. But the brutal mistreatment
of peaceful votingrights protesters in Alabama, including the nowfamous confrontation in Selma that
became known as "Bloody Sunday," galvanized public opinion and forced Johnson to act. (Issacharoff et
al, 2012)
This learning block uses the history of the Voting Rights Act as the vehicle to hone your understanding
of causality and contingency and to help you begin thinking about the use of historical evidence.
Learning Objectives
In this learning block, you will:
Assess the causes and consequences of a historical event
Consider the types of evidence you will need to understand the significance of a historical event
References
Bardolph, R. (1970). The Civil Rights Record: Black Americans and the Law, 18491970. New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell.
Issacharoff, S.; Karlan, P.; and Pildes, R. (2012). The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process.
New York: Foundation Press.
The New York Times (2014, October 16). "Black Turnout in 1964, and Beyond." Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/upshot/blackturnoutin1964andbeyond.html
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
From the beginning, supporters and opponents of African
American civil rights both understood the critical importance of
voting rights. Supporters strove, after the Civil War, to ensure
that freed slaves would have the political power that comes with
voting; toward that end, they passed the Fifteenth Amendment, to
guarantee voting rights, and the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and
1871, to combat the Ku Klux Klan's efforts to suppress black
voting through intimidation and violence.
But federal enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment effectively
ceased with the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Opponents knew
that allowing African Americans to vote would threaten the
structure of white supremacy on which the Jim Crow South was
founded. In addition to physical intimidation, then, Southern
whites erected an imposing set of legal obstacles to deter blacks
from voting: poll taxes, whitesonly primaries, literacy tests,
property qualifications, and grandfather clauses.
In 1957, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about those legal
obstacles in his "Give Us the Ballot" speech; in 1965, President
Lyndon Johnson spoke about them in an address to Congress:
King: "Give Us the Ballot"
An 1879 cartoon criticized the use of
literacy tests to deny African
Americans the right to vote. (Click
icon for citation)
[A]ll types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered
voters. The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic
tradition. And so our most urgent request to the president of the United States and every member of
Congress is to give us the right to vote. [Audience:] (Yes)
Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.
Give us the ballot (Yes), and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti
lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South (All right)
and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.
Give us the ballot (Give us the ballot), and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs
(Yeah) into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.
Give us the ballot (Give us the ballot), and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill (All
right now) and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a "Southern Manifesto"
because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice. (Tell 'em about it)
Give us the ballot (Yeah), and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will do justly and
love mercy (Yeah), and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who will, who have
felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the Divine.
Give us the ballot (Yes), and we will quietly and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement
the Supreme Court's decision of May seventeenth, 1954. (That's right)
Johnson: "Our Duty Must Be Clear"
Every device of which human ingenuity is capable has been used to deny this right. The Negro citizen
may go to register only to be told that the day is wrong, or the hour is late, or the official in charge is
absent. And if he persists, and if he manages to present himself to the registrar, he may be disqualified
because he did not spell out his middle name or because he abbreviated a word on the application.
And if he manages to fill out an application he is given a test. The registrar is the sole judge of whether
he passes this test. He may be asked to recite the entire Constitution, or explain the most complex
provisions of State law. And even a college degree cannot be used to prove that he can read and write.
For the fact is that the only way to pass these barriers is to show a white skin. Experience has clearly
shown that the existing process of law cannot overcome systematic and ingenious discrimination. No law
that we now have on the books—and I have helped to put three of them there—can ensure the right to
vote when local officials are determined to deny it.
In such a case our duty must be clear to all of us. The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from
voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend
that Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath.
Video Transcript: Lyndon Johnson Voting Rights Speech
Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress:
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.
I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section
of this country, to join me in that cause.
At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's
unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at
Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
There, longsuffering men and women peacefully protested the denial of their rights as Americans.
Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed.
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for selfsatisfaction in
the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans. But there is cause for hope and for faith in
our democracy in what is happening here tonight.
For the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people have summoned into
convocation all the majesty of this great Governmentthe Government of the greatest Nation on
earth.
Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to
serve man.
In our time we have come to live with moments of great crisis. Our lives have been marked with
debate about great issues; issues of war and peace, issues of prosperity and depression. But rarely in
any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a
challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and
the purposes and the meaning of our beloved Nation.
The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every
enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then
we will have failed as a people and as a nation.
For with a country as with a person, "What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and
lose his own soul?"
There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is
only an American problem.
The modern Civil Rights movement that arose in the wake of the Brown decision placed a high premium
on winning federal legislation to enforce voting rights. The movement focused its efforts on the states of
the South, because the de jure denial of voting rights was a uniquely Southern issue; virtually no such
legal structures had been erected in the North or West to deny blacks the franchise. Three efforts to pass
votingrights legislation were derailed by Southern opposition in Congress: votingrights provisions of
the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1963 were watered down to the point of ineffectiveness.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination,
included some votingrights provisions but not the broad prohibition of literacy tests for which civil
rights leaders had hoped. The Act's primary focus, rather, was on ending segregation in public
accommodations and in public education.
Following his landslide victory in the 1964 Presidential election, which also produced huge Democratic
majorities in Congress, President Lyndon Johnson determined to push for a tough new votingrights law.
But his political advisers, concerned about the political impact of another civil rights battle so soon after
passage of the Civil Rights Act, urged him to wait. (May, 2013)
In early 1965, Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, including James Bevel of the SCLC,
began organizing votingrights protests in Selma, Alabama, where the local sheriff had violently
suppressed AfricanAmerican voter registration efforts. In February, King and hundreds of other
protesters were arrested for violating the city's antiparade ordinance. King responded by writing "A
Letter from a Selma Alabama Jail," which ran as an advertisement in The New York Times; the letter
famously noted that, " This is Selma, Alabama. There are more negroes in jail with me than there are on
the voting rolls." (King, 1965)
Shortly after King's arrest, another votingrights
protest in Marion, Alabama, turned deadly when
Alabama
state
troopers
attacked
the
demonstrators; an AfricanAmerican Army
veteran named Jimmie Lee Jackson was fatally
shot by police. At his funeral, James Bevel
suggested that protesters march from Selma to the
state capital in Montgomery to dramatize their
cause. (May, 2013)
Two weeks later, on March 7, 1965, about 600
protesters, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams
of the SCLC, began marching out of Selma. As
they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the Alabama police attack SelmatoMontgomery Marchers
on Bloody Sunday, 1965. (Click icon for citation)
demonstrators met a small army of state troopers
and county deputies; the law officers began beating the unarmed protesters with nightsticks, fired tear
gas into the crowd, and charged the protesters on horseback. A total of 17 protesters were hospitalized,
and another 50 were treated for injuries in what became known as "Bloody Sunday." (Reed, 1966)
The violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge was captured by newspaper photographers and television
news crews; the image of peaceful protesters being savagely beaten by the police outraged public
opinion outside the South, and abroad. Eight days after Bloody Sunday, amid continuing violence against
votingrights demonstrators in Alabama, President Johnson addressed Congress and called for swift
passage of his votingrights proposal. Echoing the old spiritual that had become the anthem of the civil
rights movement, Johnson declared that "We shall overcome" in the struggle for voting rights.
Despite fervent Southern opposition and a 24day filibuster in the Senate, the Voting Rights Act received
final Congressional approval on August 4, 1965. Two days later, with Martin Luther King and Rosa
Parks in attendance at the White House, Johnson signed the bill into law. (May, 2013)
References
King, M. L. (1965). "A Letter from Martin Luther King from a Selma, Alabama Jail." The New York Times,
February 5, 1965.
May, G. (2013). Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy.
New York: Basic Books.
Reed, R. (1966). "'Bloody Sunday' Was Year Ago." The New York Times, March 6, 1966.
The Impact of the Voting Rights Act
The immediate effects of the Voting Rights Act were quickly felt. Voter registration surged among
African Americans in the states of the Old South, the region directly targeted by the law's "special
provisions." By 1970, a majority of eligible African Americans had registered to vote in nine of the 11
former Confederate states. In Mississippi, black voter registration increased from just 6.7 percent in
1964, to 59.8 percent in 1967. (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,
2001)
This surge in voter registration has led some legal experts to characterize the Voting Rights Act as " the
single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress." (U.S. Department of
Justice, 2009)
Two key factors contributed to the effectiveness
of the Voting Rights Act. The first was its limited
scope: the "special provisions" of the Act applied
to only those states and localities with a
demonstrated history of discrimination against
AfricanAmerican voting rights. This limited
scope allowed the Justice Department to use its
enforcement resources most effectively, in areas
where the potential for discrimination was
greatest. The second was the Act's preclearance
provision, which prevented any changes in voting
laws from taking effect unless they were
approved by the Justice Department or a federal
court. [The Supreme Court suspended the
preclearance provision in 2013.]
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights
Act of 1965 while Martin Luther King, Jr. and others
look on. (Click icon for citation)
Increased voter registration did not, however, translate immediately into increased political power for
African Americans in the South. Whitedominated state legislators responded to the Voting Rights Act
by enacting new measures to limit the effectiveness of AfricanAmerican voting: turning some formerly
elective offices into appointive ones and changing many other elective offices to "atlarge" seats, which
diluted the impact of new black voters. Those same legislators also engaged in racial gerrymandering,
redrawing legislative and Congressional districts to maximize white voting power and limit the
effectiveness of AfricanAmerican votes. (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2001)
Over time, Justice Department lawsuits reversed many of these political ploys. Key Supreme Court
rulings, including Wesberry v. Sanders (1964), sought to reduce the impact of racial gerrymandering by
applying the concept of "one person, one vote" to the issue of legislative redistricting. And later
amendments to the Act required states, under certain circumstances, to create majorityminority districts
to increase the odds that African Americans and other minoritygroup candidates would be elected to
Congress.
At the same time, the overall increase in AfricanAmerican voter registration was not matched by a
similarly sharp rise in AfricanAmerican voter turnout. Nationally, the proportion of African Americans
who actually cast a ballot in a Presidential election peaked at 58.5 percent in 1964—the year before the
Voting Rights Act was passed—and did not return to this level until Barack Obama's first presidential
campaign in 2008. (Flippen, 2014) Obviously, AfricanAmerican turnout increased in Southern states,
where registration had increased so sharply, but it declined in nonSouthern states.
Relatively low turnout among AfricanAmerican voters is attributable to many different factors,
including differences in income and education, as well as a perception that the political process is less
relevant to their lives. (Fulwood, 2014) And relevance is, in some ways, related to race: like many other
racial and ethnic groups, African Americans are significantly more likely to vote when a member of their
own group is on the ballot. (Laney, 2011)
Without question, the Voting Rights Act has led to sharply increased representation of African
Americans in Congress, state legislatures, and local offices. In 1964, for instance, only five African
Americans served in Congress; by 2015, that number had increased to 48. (U.S House of
Representatives, 2016) And between 1965 and 1985, the number of AfricanAmerican state legislators in
the former states of the Confederacy had increased from three to 176. (Grofman and Handley, 1991)
What remains open to question is whether increased AfricanAmerican political representation has led to
an improvement in the lives of most African Americans. On this point, there is conflicting evidence.
Mississippi, for instance, in the mid1990s had more AfricanAmerican elected officials than any other
state—yet per capita income for blacks in Mississippi was less than half that for whites, and levels of
educational attainment were also significantly lower among blacks than among whites. At that same
time, however, state spending on public housing and education had increased sharply in the years
previous, and incidents of racial violence had decreased greatly. (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,
2001) This mixed record is in fact typical of many states.
References
Flippen, A. (2014). "Black Turnout in 1964 and Beyond." The New York Times, September 16, 2014. Retrieved
from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/upshot/blackturnoutin1964andbeyond.html?_r=0
Grofman, B. and Handley, L. (1991). "The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on Black Representation in Southern
State Legislatures." Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1 (February, 1991), 111128.
Laney, G. (2011). The Voting Rights Act of 1965: Historical Background and Current Issues. New York: Nova
Science Publishers.
Southern Poverty Law Center (2016). Expanding Voting Rights: Percentage of Registered Voters in Black Voting
Age
Population.
Retrieved
from
http://www.tolerance.org/sites/default/files/general/Percentage%20of%20Registered%20Black%20Voters.pdf
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2001). Racial and Ethnic Tensions in American Communities: Poverty,
Inequality, and Discrimination—Volume VII: The Mississippi Delta Report. Washington, DC: U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights.
The Voting Rights Act: Further Reading
What effect has the Voting Rights Act had on American politics in general? While the Act has clearly
had an impact on voter registration and representation among African Americans, has it affected the
political system more broadly?
While race is certainly not the only factor affecting voter turnout and voting patterns in American
politics, political scientists and pollsters have long recognized that it is one of the most highly
consequential. (Junn, 2000) To the extent that the Voting Rights Act opened up the political system to
many more African Americans, it is reasonable to conclude that it had a significant impact on that
system.
One theory that's popular among political scientists is that the Act, by bringing more African Americans
into the political system as voters and as candidates, has made white voters more comfortable with the
idea of voting for African Americans. Certainly, it seems reasonable to conclude that Barack Obama
could never have won the presidency had the Voting Rights Act not been passed in 1965—or to put it
another way, that Obama's election was contingent on passage of the Voting Rights Act.
But the historical record is a bit more complicated than that. While the Voting Rights Act certainly
brought more African Americans into the political system, it also produced negative reactions among
some white voters; in the states of the former Confederacy, for instance, African Americans by and large
win election to the state legislature only from districts where the electorate is overwhelmingly African
American, while majoritywhite districts rarely if ever elect African Americans. (Grofman and Handley,
1991) And it's worth remembering that President Obama received only 43 percent of the white vote in
2008, and just 39 percent in 2012. (Roper Center, 2008; 2012)
Indeed, some political scientists believe that this pattern of "racially polarized" voting has contributed to
more systemic changes in American politics. On the largest level, passage of the Voting Rights Act led
to a major party realignment. After passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act by a
Democraticdominated Congress, white Southerners—who had previously identified strongly with the
Democratic
Party—shifted
towards
the
Democratic
Party—shifted
towards
the
Republicans, a move encouraged by President
Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy." Over time,
Southern voters began to replace conservative
Democratic members of Congress with
Republicans; this meant more Republicans in
Congress but it also meant fewer conservative
Democrats, which had the effect of making
Congressional Democrats more liberal as a group.
As a result, Congress has become more sharply
polarized along conservativeliberal lines. (Barber
and McCarty, 2013)
President Jimmy Carter meeting with the Congressional
Black Caucus, 1978. (Click icon for citation)
Finally, the requirement that states create
majorityminority districts has also had an impact
on the political system. While the creation of majorityminority districts resulted in the election of more
African Americans and others to Congress, it also concentrated the minority voters in only a few districts
and left surrounding districts with a higher proportion of white voters. As a result, majorityminority
districts in the South send more minorities (who tend to be liberal Democrats) to Congress, but the
majoritywhite districts tend to send more conservative Republicans. This factor, too, has contributed to
the polarization of Congress. (Hill, 2013)
Scholars disagree about the extent to which the Voting Rights Act has contributed to the polarization of
Congress.
Pildes: Blame the Voting Rights Act
The following excerpt, from a scholarly article on the impact of the Voting Rights Act, or VRA, focuses
on the effect that the VRA had in ending the longtime Democratic Party dominance of Southern politics.
It is excerpted from "Why the Center Does Not Hold: The Causes of Hyperpolarized Democracy in
America," by prominent political scientist Richard Pildes. Click on the title of the article to read,
download, and print a copy of the text. These readings are provided by the Shapiro Library. This reading
is required. You will have to log into Shapiro Library with your SNHU credentials.
The 1965 VRA, and related changes in the era in constitutional doctrine and law, began the process of
unraveling this system. The VRA began what might be considered the "purification" or "maturation" of
the American political system. Put another way, the VRA initiated the rise of a genuine political system
in the South, which meant the destruction of the oneparty monopoly and the emergence, eventually, of a
more normal system of competitive twoparty politics. Just as the peculiar structure of the oneparty
South had projected itself onto the shape of national political parties, so too this dramatic transformation
of Southern politics in turn reshaped the essential structure of the national political parties. As the VRA
and related measures broke down the barriers to electoral participation in the South—literacy tests, poll
taxes, manipulative registration practices, and durational residency requirement—a massive infusion of
new voters, mostly black but white as well, entered and reconfigured Southern politics.
These voters were, on average, much more liberal than the median voting white Southerner had been
before 1965. No longer could conservative, oneparty political monopoly be maintained. Over the next
generation, these new voters ripped asunder the old Democratic Party of the South, eventually
fragmenting it into two parties: a highly conservative Republican Party, into which many of these
formerly Democratic Southern voters fled, and a new, moderatetoliberal Democratic Party that was
more in line ideologically with the rest of the Democratic Party nationwide. There was, of course, a self
reinforcing feedback dynamic to this whole process as well; as the Democratic Party became more
liberal in the South, more conservatives fled; as more conservatives fled, the Democratic Party became
even more liberal. At the national level, the progressive strands on racial issues that had existed in the
Republican Party diminished, to be replaced by a more conservative stance on racial issues, while the
Democratic Party at the national level became the party of racial liberalism.
Kennedy: Don't Blame the VRA
The following excerpt, from a scholarly rebuttal to Pildes's analysis of the effects of the Voting Rights
Act, argues that today's political polarization is caused in large part by the divisive nature of the issues
being debated. It is excerpted from "What Pildes Missed: The Framers, the True Impact of the Voting
Rights Act, and the Far Right", by prominent political scientist David M. Kennedy. Click on the title of
the article to read, download, and print a copy of the text. These readings are provided by the Shapiro
Library. This reading is required. You will have to log into Shapiro Library with your SNHU credentials.
Professor Pildes has perhaps focused too much on institutional factors and too swiftly cast out of the
discussion the substantive content of American politics today. For example, I referred earlier to the Civil
War. One would have a heavy burden of proof to carry if one wished to explain that systemic breakdown
of the usual political process without mentioning slavery.
Similarly, we cannot fully grasp the divisiveness of our own political moment without acknowledging
the salience of issues that are by their very nature polarizing. These issues elude the capacity of a
political system designed to reconcile differences and have many of the properties that slavery had in the
nineteenth century. They include abortion and gay marriage, to take the two most conspicuous examples,
though one might easily add issues of war and peace. These matters are all highly emotionally charged
and ideologically grounded. They simply do not lend themselves to the kind of compromising that is the
stuff of "normal" politics. They might be called Solomonic issues, where the interests at stake are
indivisible and the only solutions acceptable to stakeholders are unitary, not comprehensive.
Additionally, polarization affects different political camps differently. What we have today might be
characterized as "asymmetric polarization." The conservative right is much more demographically and
culturally homogenous and much less inclined to compromise on valueladen social issues than the much
more heterogeneous Democratic Party.
Finally, among the factors that underwrote the halcyon days of harmony and bipartisanship in the post
war era was a phenomenally wellperforming economy. It is no accident that the substantial fulfillment
of the civil rights agenda, after a century of postponement, took place in that context of shared affluence,
raising expectations all around, and great national selfconfidence. Conversely, much of the acrimony
that crept into our political culture after the 1960s has reflected the much more constrained economic
circumstances of that later period.
References
Junn, J. (2000). "The Significance of Race and Class for Political Participation." Prepared for presentation at the
conference, "Political Participation: Building a Research Agenda,"
held by the Center for the Study of
Democratic
Politics
at
Princeton
University.
Retrieved
from
www.princeton.edu/csdp/events/Participation2000/junn.pdf.
Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 5-4: Historical Writing
If you tried to start writing your essay without any preparation, you would probably get discouraged and
give up. Up until this point, you have been learning about the different pieces that go into your essay.
These steps have been broken down to make the essay seem less daunting.
Now that you have completed your writing plan, you have the framework for your essay in place. At this
point, you will need to start drafting the actual content of your essay. This learning block will explain the
various parts of the essay, as well as the best way to approach each one. You will be given the chance to
practice drafting parts of an essay before you start on your own.
Learning Objectives
In this learning block, you will:
Define the different parts of a historical analysis essay
Draft the introduction of your historical analysis essay
Revise a thesis statement for your historical analysis essay
Introduction of the Paper
From your writing plan, you have a solid topic, research question, thesis statements, and sources
outlined. Before you begin drafting your actual historical analysis essay, let's review the different
components of an essay, starting with the first paragraph.
Introductory Paragraph
An essay should begin with an introduction paragraph. The introduction presents the audience with a
general overview and background of your topic, a short summary of the evidence that will be presented
to support your argument, and your thesis statement, which outlines the argument of your essay.
One important function of an introduction paragraph is to engage
the audience and draw the reader in. So, you should introduce the
topic you will be writing on in the most interesting and appealing
way possible. The introduction also allows you to set the tone of
the paper and catch the reader's attention. A brief outline of what
information, claims, and evidence you will touch on in your essay
will let your audience know what they can expect.
After introducing the general topic of your essay, you should go
on to provide an overview of how the rest of the paper will proceed. This brief overview of the structure
of the essay should show the audience how the subsequent sections of the essay are supposed to relate to
one another.
It is important that introduction paragraph be as clear as possible, so it is usually a good idea to reread
and revise an introduction paragraph once the rest of a paper has been written. Sometimes during the
writing of a paper, an author might change how he or she chooses to present or defend his or her
position. When this happens, the introduction paragraph must be revised to reflect those changes.
In the introduction, you should also introduce your thesis statement, which can be the last sentence or
two of the paragraph. This one or two sentence version of your argument should not come out of
nowhere. Your introduction should lay the groundwork for your thesis.
Writing an Introduction
The passage below is excerpted from "'The Fight Was Instilled in Us': High School Activism and the
Civil Rights Movement in Charleston".
Remember, this passage is a sample of an introduction written by a professional historian writing for a
specific audience. The audience had an impact on the way this passage was written.
"The Fight Was Instilled in Us": High School Activism and the Civil Rights Movement
in Charleston
"I remember people standing and staring at us like we
were trouble makers and were trying to upset
Charleston," Harvey Gantt, a graduate of Burke High
School in Charleston, recalled of the student led sitin on
April 1, 1960. "We at least got the attention of the
community. We were feeling young and gifted and ready
to tear down a broken social system. We felt like we
were pioneers that day," Gantt said. Gantt was one of
twentyfour Burke High School students who marched to
S.H. Kress & Co., a segregated fiveanddime store on
King Street in downtown Charleston. The students
The S.H. Kress & Co. building in
occupied nearly onehalf of the lunchcounter seats,
Charleston, SC. (Click icon for citation)
humming, singing freedom songs, and reciting prayers.
The students maintained their composure as the manager
of the store asked them to leave, white patrons cleared
the premises, and bystanders circulated rumors of a bomb threat. Police arrested the students,
charged them with trespassing, and put them in jail. By examining the effort to desegregate public
facilities through the lens of the first sitin in Charleston, this article will illustrate how a small,
committed group of local high school students and teachers played an integral, though overlooked,
role in the civil rights movement.
References
Hale, J. (2013). "The fight was instilled in us": High school activism and the Civil Rights Movement in Charleston.
South Carolina Historical Magazine, 114 (1). Retrieved fromhttp://ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?
url=http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/docview/1442509559?accountid=3783
Body and Conclusion of the Paper
The introduction to your paper is exactly that, an introduction. Your argument, evidence, and the meat of
your essay all come into play in the body of the paper, and the conclusion wraps up what you have
argued.
Structure
It is necessary to organize your paper in a way that makes sense for your argument. Often your
thesis can influence the structure of how you present your examples.
Flow
In the body of your paper, you should move from the general (your thesis) to specific (examples and
evidence). You should support any general statements you make about your topic with detailed
examples.
Paragraphs
Each of the paragraphs in the body of your essay should be at least 4 sentences. The first sentence of
each paragraph is the topic sentence.
Topic Sentences
The topic sentence tells your reader what that paragraph is about. It should relate back to the thesis.
Your topic sentences also allow you to break down your argument into more specific pieces.
Support
You will support your topic sentence with evidence and analysis. The information you find in your
primary and secondary sources will not stand on its own, which is why you might provide an
explanation of how each source supports your thesis. You will learn more about incorporating
historical evidence in Theme: Analyzing History, Learning Block 7.
Argument
Scholarly arguments rely on facts, and you should attempt to convince your audience of the validity
of your thesis through reason, not emotion.
Transitions
The ideas in your paper should flow smoothly. Connect your ideas with transitional phrases. The
final sentence of each paragraph should sum up what was said, as well as guide the reader to the
next piece of the argument.
The body should make up the bulk of your paper. This is where you argue your thesis and elaborate on
the outline you presented in your introduction. Your introduction and thesis statement should give you an
idea of how the paper will be organized, such as which pieces of your claim you will argue first.
Body Paragraphs
The thesis statement presented in the introduction paragraph is the main idea of the entire paper, and
each subsequent paragraph should work towards supporting that thesis statement. The majority of an
essay is made up of supporting paragraphs that serve this purpose.
Each supporting paragraph should begin with a topic sentence, contain supporting sentences that back up
the main idea presented in the topic sentence, and end with a summary sentence that reiterates that main
idea.
Each of the topic sentences in your supporting paragraphs should relate back to your thesis statement.
You should also dedicate at least one supporting paragraph to addressing counterarguments. Identify
reasons someone might object to your argument, and respond to that objection using evidence you
gathered during your research.
When constructing your supporting paragraphs, keep in mind the P.I.E. method. The following graphic
reviews the P.I.E. method.
Conclusion Paragraph
Your conclusion is the final paragraph, and this is where you pull your argument together. You should
reflect on your thesis statement, and the topic sentence of your conclusion should be a specific rewording
of your thesis. In your conclusion, you can also state what the argument means within the context of the
study of history. This is an opportunity to remind your readers of the most important points you made in
your paper, reiterate your thesis statement, and briefly mention the arguments you used to support it.
You shouldn't introduce new arguments or positions in the conclusion paragraph, because you won't
have time or space to support any new material. The only time you should make an exception to this is if
your instructor specifically asks you to do something different.
Even though the primary purpose of a conclusion paragraph is to review material you've already
presented earlier in the essay, it is important not to simply repeat yourself. You should try to restate your
thesis in a new, fresh, and interesting way. Otherwise, you might lose your audience's interest in the last
few sentences of your essay.
Tips for Writing a History Paper
Historical writing has certain conventions that you should pay attention to as you begin to draft your
historical analysis essay. Although historians might disagree about how they evaluate the past, in
general, you can expect that they will follow certain "writing rules." Of course, in this class and in every
course, you should confirm what writing style and format your instructor prefers for your assignment.
When writing a history paper, it is important to write in the past tense when speaking about historical
events, since they happened in the past. Your entire paper will not be in past tense, however. Avoid
generalizations and be specific as possible. Phrases like "some people believe..." have no place in
historical writing. Always maintain a formal, academic voice, and never use first person ("I, me, we, us,"
etc.) or second person ("you").
When studying the past, it is easy to project our own present day values onto events that happened before
us. Try not to relate all historical events back to the present, and do not jumble the order of chronological
events with anachronisms. Provide context for events, information, and evidence that you present in your
writing. Most importantly, proofread your work!
References
Wewers, D. (2007). A Brief Guide to Writing the History Paper. Harvard College Writing Center. Retrieved from
http://writingproject.fas.harvard.edu/files/hwp/files/bg_writing_history.pdf
Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 6-1: Analyzing Historical
Texts
By now, you have encountered many scholarly articles that you will be using in your historical analysis
essay. You have probably skimmed them using the A.R.I.A. criteria you were introduced to in Theme:
Communicating Historical Ideas, but now it is time to dive in and critically analyze them. As you begin
to examine these sources more closely, you might find that you will not need to use some of them in your
essay. That's okay! Historical research and writing is not meant to be static. The sources you chose at the
beginning might not be relevant if your argument changes as you write your paper.
The active reading strategies you encounter in this learning block will help you become a more critical
reader and researcher. You should plan to revisit the databases in the Shapiro Library as you begin
drafting the pieces of your essay in order to use these strategies.
Learning Objectives
In this learning block, you will:
Explore active reading strategies
Describe the importance of critically analyzing historical texts
Apply active reading strategies to historical research
Active Reading
Reading comprehensively is important in order to understand and process the information presented in
text, especially in scholarly sources. Active reading is one strategy that will help you read critically in
this course and others.
Active reading refers to a process of reading in which you
approach the text with an intention to understand not simply what
it says but also how it says it. In passive reading, we read simply
for information, or sometimes we read only to be entertained or
distracted for a short time. After engaging in passive reading, the
content doesn't always stick with us. And most of the time, it
doesn't matter.
But if we want to remember and learn something while we read,
active reading practices will help us get a better grip on the
reading, and what we have read will stick with us later on. Up until now, you have been reading excerpts
of texts and finding sources for your historical analysis essay. You should apply active reading strategies
as you begin to read your sources closely.
Active Reading Strategies
PreReading Inquiry
Before reading the text, take a look at the title, the author, and any other descriptive information that
is provided. Then ask yourself questions like: "What will be the subject of this reading?" "Have I
read anything else on this topic?" "Have I read anything else written by this author?" "What do I
hope to learn from this reading?" "What will I be expected to do or know after I finish this reading?"
Take Notes
While you read the text, use a highlighter or a pen to mark up the page. (If you are unable to print a
hard copy of the text, you may be able to cutandpaste the text into a Word document and use the
"Comments" tool.) Highlight or underline key terms and ideas. Jot down questions and observations
in the margins. Here is a guide to several of the most widely used notetaking systems.
Make Connections
Make texttoself connections as you read. Can you personally relate to the subject of this reading?
Are there any characters in the reading that remind you of yourself or people you know? Also make
texttotext connections. Does this reading remind you of another text that you have encountered?
Finally, make texttoworld connections. Does this text relate to any realworld people, places, or
events from the past or present?
Summarize
After reading the text, take some time to digest what you have read. Consider the overall meaning of
the reading. Reread any sections that may have been confusing. Summarize larger sections of the
text and then summarize the entire reading in one or two sentences.
Apply What You Have Learned
Tell another person about this reading and what you learned from it. Consider how you would
explain this reading to different audiences.
Critical Analysis
As you engage in active reading, you should also be critically analyzing the texts. This approach will
ensure that you are not a passive reader. As you read your sources, you should consider questions like:
What is the author's main argument?
Is the author's argument supported with evidence?
Can you find evidence from the text itself to support your argument?
What connections can you make to this text and others you have read on this topic? What
differences do you see?
Do you agree or disagree with the author?
Keep these strategies in mind in this course and your future classes, and you will become a more active
and critical reader.
Theme: Analyzing History | Learning Block 6-2: Desegregating Boston's
Schools
Desegregating Boston's Schools
In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in
the public schools is unconstitutional. What it did not provide was an answer to the practical question:
How do we do that?
A year later, in a decision that became known as Brown II, the court provided an answer to that question
—sort of. It delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to federal district courts and said that
schools in segregated districts should be integrated "with all deliberate speed." The ambiguity of that
phrase was seized on by many opponents as a license for delay, and for close to a decade, there was little
progress in integrating many segregated districts. (Civil Rights Movement Veterans, 2016)
The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, coupled with later Supreme Court decisions ordering school
districts to speed up the pace of desegregation, lent the process more urgency. But resistance to school
desegregation—not just in the South but in many cities of the North and West as well—remained a
formidable obstacle to the goal of achieving racial balance in public schools.
In Massachusetts, the state legislature in 1965 passed a law requiring the integration of all segregated
schools in the state, the vast majority of which were in the capital city of Boston. (Levy, 1971) But the
Boston School Committee resisted, and it was not until 1974—when a federal court ordered a citywide
school busing plan to end segregation of the Boston schools—that the process of integration finally
began.
That process did not go smoothly. Fierce resistance in several of the city's predominantly white
neighborhoods forced state police and National Guard troops to escort AfricanAmerican students into
the schools, and the ensuing "Boston busing crisis" roiled the schools, and the city, for years. (Lukas,
1985) The Boston public schools were not declared fully desegregated until 1987.
This learning block uses the events of the Boston busing crisis as a prism for looking once again at the
concepts of cause and consequence, and as a way to illustrate how you can use historical evidence to
make an argument that supports your thesis.
Learning Objectives
In this learning block, you will:
Describe the causes, course, and consequences of a historical event
Use historical evidence to support the development of an analytical thesis statement
References
Civil Rights Movement Veterans (2016). The "Brown II," "All Deliberate Speed" Retrieved from
http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis55.htm#1955ads (May 25, 2016).
Lukas, J.A. (1985). Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
Levy, F. (1971). Northern Schools and Civil Rights: The Racial Imbalance Act of Massachusetts. Chicago:
Markham Publishing Company.
Boston, Busing, and Backlash
The struggle for voting rights, which we looked at in Theme: Analyzing History, Learning Block 3, was
a struggle against de jure segregation that existed in just one part of the country: the states of the Old
South. But the problem of de facto segregation was one that existed throughout the country, and its
effects were perhaps seen most clearly in the nation's public schools.
A series of Supreme Court cases in the early 1960s made it clear that de facto school segregation was
unconstitutional and that segregated schools would be integrated by court order if necessary. Beginning
in the early 1970s, the Court began requiring school busing plans, which would send AfricanAmerican
students to largely white schools and send white students to largely AfricanAmerican schools, as a
means of achieving greater racial balance.
In Boston, the city's small but growing AfricanAmerican community began protesting the quality of
public schools in largely black neighborhoods in the early 1960s. In 1965, in response to a federal
investigation of possible segregation in the Boston public schools, the Massachusetts legislature passed
the Racial Imbalance Act. The new law outlawed segregation in Massachusetts schools and threatened to
cut off state funding for any school district that did not comply. (Levy, 1971)
Of the 55 Massachusetts schools identified as racially
imbalanced, 45 were in the City of Boston. But the Boston
School Committee, an allwhite elected body led by Louise
Day Hicks, refused to acknowledge the segregation and
balked at any plan to remedy the situation. Hicks's
opposition to school desegregation boosted her popularity,
particularly in the city's workingclass, heavily Irish
American neighborhoods; in 1967, she narrowly missed
being elected mayor, but in 1969, she was elected to the city
council, and in 1970, she was elected to Congress to
represent her home neighborhood, the IrishAmerican
enclave of South Boston. (Lukas, 1985)
The School Committee continued to stonewall demands to
implement a meaningful desegregation plan. But in June
1974, federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, deciding a lawsuit
A R.O.A.R button opposing Boston's
brought against the School Committee by the NAACP, ruled
desegregation. (Click icon for citation)
that Boston's schools were unconstitutionally segregated. He
ordered that any school whose enrollment was more than 50 percent nonwhite must be balanced
according to race.
To achieve that balance, Garrity ordered the schools to adopt a widespread busing plan by the first day of
school in September. That announcement triggered a powerful backlash among white parents and
students. Hicks formed an antibusing group called Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) that
spearheaded much of the opposition to Garrity's desegregation order.
While the plan involved the busing of thousands of students from different neighborhoods across the
city, the greatest attention was focused on the high schools in South Boston—a heavily workingclass
and overwhelmingly IrishAmerican part of town—and Roxbury, an overwhelmingly AfricanAmerican
neighborhood. Garrity's order effectively paired the two schools, by requiring that they essentially swap
hundreds of students.
Decades after the fact, Garrity's busing order is still hotly debated in Boston. Supporters say that his
unyielding approach was the only way to overcome white resistance and achieve racial balance in
Boston's schools. Critics say Garrity focused too much on the goal of achieving mathematical balance,
rather than focusing on a plan to improve school quality for both AfricanAmerican and white children.
(Gellerman, 2014)
Robert J. Allison, chair of the History Department of Suffolk University in Boston and author of A Short
History of Boston, describes the causes and consequences of the Boston busing crisis in this video:
Video Transcript: Boston Busing Crisis
Robert Allison
Before World War II, most people did not go to college. Before World War I, most people did not
go to high school. High schools were created in the early 20th century as an idea of extending an
education. People ordinarily would have finished school in the 8th grade, gone to work...now we go
to high school to learn some academic skills but also some industrial skills. For example, at South
Boston High School, which opened in about 1900, the primary major was sheet metal work. At
Charlestown High School, the primary major was auto mechanics. If you went to Brighton High
School in Boston, you would learn to be an electrician. Boston's schools were not segregated by
race. They were, however, very much organized by class. The blue collar students went on to blue
collar careers through the educational trajectory, the children of stockbrokers or of accountants or
of ministers, lawyers, doctors, would go to the exam schools.
The second World War changes much of this with the GI Bill of Rights, which opens college
education to all. Now through much of the 20th century, Boston's population was declining as it's
blue collar industrial base was fading. In fact, as the industrial base of all of New England was
disappearing, with the disappearance of the textile mills and the shoe factories. You no longer could
earn a good living in one of these blue collar jobs. GI Bill opens up college to everyone.
Now at the same time that this is happening, as Boston's population is in a period of decline, we
have a migration of African Americans into Boston, and expanding the black population, primarily
in the South End and in Roxbury. And the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s draws
attention to the disparities between services and schools for African Americans and for white
students. The truth in Boston was, the schools really weren't very good for anyone. The school
system really operated to provide jobs for the people who voted for members of the school
committee: five member, unpaid, elected board, elected citywide. And members of the school
committee were in a great position to help award patronage jobs to custodians, teachers, others who
would work in this very large enterprise, the Boston Public School System.
And this collides in the 1950s and 60s with a number of other unanticipated things. One is the
demise of Boston's blue collar economy. There's no longer a need for the sheet metal jobs you could
have gotten out of Southie High, and the electricians work you would get at Brighton High. There is
a need instead for people to go into managerial jobs, to get a white collar education. Also the state of
the schools, the school, there'd been a spade of building of schools in the 1850s and in the 1890s and
in the early 1900s. Not much since then. So the schools themselves are quite old. And another part of
this is the African American population of Boston is growing as other parts of the population are
shrinking. Boston's black community wants to know why the schools in their neighborhoods are not
very good. Students throughout the city could have asked the same question. At the same time, you
have an energized Civil Rights Movement raising questions of racial disparity throughout the
country. And in the late 1950s and early 1960s groups of reformers, African American and white, are
trying to change the makeup of the Boston school committee, to bring the school system generally in
line with prevailing educational trends and provide a quality education for all of the students.
And this runs into resistance from the existing school committee, which does pretty well, awarding
patronage jobs to its friends and not rewarding those who are its...not its friends. So you have these
changes going on in Boston, and the black community in the early 1960s is really protesting the
nature of the schools. Martin Luther King visits Boston in 1965, and there's an attempt to have him
meet with the school committee which falls through. There's a recognition that the schools aren't
very good, and the school committee isn't doing anything about it.
And then the African American community raises this very good point, that many of the schools in
this city are racially segregated. Children in Roxbury and the South End are going to primarily
black schools, students in the rest of the city going to primarily white schools, and this was one of
the pieces of a reform movement emanating in the 1960s. And in the early 1970s the black parents
in Boston bring a law suit against the school system charging that the school system in Boston is
racially segregated. And after a series of Supreme Court ruling in the 1950s and 60s, the court had
said that having schools which are segregated by fact because this is a white neighborhood / this is a
black neighborhood, is as discriminatory as having a school system that is segregated by law,
saying white students can only go to white schools, black students can only go to black schools.
That is, the Supreme Court has said: defacto segregation is just as much a violation of the civil
rights of students as is de jure segregation.
And in the early 1970s black parents brought suit against the Boston public schools and Judge
Arthur Garrity ruled that Boston, in fact, was running a segregated school system, and it had...
Judge Garrity, in June of 1974, said that Boston is in fact running a segregated school system and
by September of 1974 Boston's schools will have to be desegregated. Now, the plan that Judge
Garrity sponsored or created is one that said, okay, what we'll do is we'll take the 11th grade from
South Boston High School and the 11th grade from Roxbury High School, and switch them. Instead
of having Roxbury High School / South Boston High School, we will have the Roxbury/South
Boston Educational Complex. In other parts of the city, and in other parts of the country, having
desegregation plans that worked more organically and combining students in elementary schools
worked better than taking 11th graders, who sometimes can be a contentious group, and simply
switching them. One of the political leaders from South Boston said that Judge Garrity had the
foresight of a mackerel and the subtlety of a chainsaw. And the plan that he creates is one that is
almost guaranteed to provoke violence, which it does.
There was rioting here in South Boston High School. Many white students, as the black students are
bused in from Roxbury, white students tended not to want to opt in to going to Roxbury, which was
perceived as being an area with crime and with other problems. And despite the valiant efforts of
teachers, administrators, parents, to inculcate peace, places like this become a center for violence,
for protest. As angry people who feel they're cut off from any source of power. The political system
to which they have been part has abandoned them. The churches to which they have been a part has
abandoned them. And they feel powerless. So we see here in front of South Boston High School are
ugly riots as the children being buse...
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