Beginning with the onset of World War II, America experienced not a sigular,unitary Civil Rights Movement -- as is typically portrayed in standard textbood accounts and the collective memory -- but rather a variety of contemporaneous civil rights and their related social movements. This course explores the history, presenting a top-down (political and legal history), bottom-up (social and cultural history), and comparative (by race and ethnicity as well as region) view of America's struggles for racial equality from roughly World War II until the present.

Civil Rights and Social Movements in U.S. History presents a top-down (political and legal history), bottom-up (social and cultural history), and comparative (by race and ethnicity as well as region) view of America's struggles for racial equality from roughly World War II until the present. Beginning with the onset of World War II, America experienced not a singular, unitary Civil Rights Movement as is typically portrayed in standard textbook accounts and the collective memory, but rather a variety of contemporaneous civil rights and their related social movements. These movements, moreover, did not follow a tidy chronological-geographic trajectory from South to North to West, nor were their participants merely black and white. Instead, from their inception, America's civil rights movements unfolded both beyond the South and beyond black and white. "Civil Rights and Social Movements in U.S. History" endeavors to equip students with a greater appreciation for the complexity of America's civil rights and social movements history, a complexity that neither a black / white nor nonwhite / white framework adequately captures. Put another way, "Civil Rights and Social Movements in U.S. History" will examine how the problem of the color line which W.E.B. DuBois deemed to be in 1903 the problem of the twentieth century might better be viewed as a problem of color lines. If America's demographics are increasingly beyond black and white, if "the classic American dilemma has now become many dilemmas of race and ethnicity," as President Clinton put it in the late 1990s, if color lines now loom as the problem of the 21st century, then a course on America's civil rights and social movements past may very well offer a glimpse into America's civil rights and social movements present and future.

Course of Special Interest for American Studies majors

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills