Unit Three | Who is America? Social History as Multicultural History
by Prof. Hangen - April 1st, 2011
This coming week we begin our third unit, on Social History as Ethnic and Immigration History. While we will mostly be focusing on immigration and migration, it’s important to begin that discussion with a look at the descendants of enslaved and trafficked African people in the United States. The outlines, events, and accomplishments of the civil rights movement in the 1950s-1960s are probably quite familiar to you (or should be!) – but you are less likely to be familiar with the earlier organizations, activists, and advocates for black equality during the era of Jim Crow (1890s-1940s) so I thought we would focus there first.
(If you’re using Zinn, this is Chapter 17)
Some people, organizations, movements or concepts to know, any of which could be a focus of Friday’s presentations:
Homer Plessy
Ida B. Wells
Booker T. Washington
W.E.B. DuBois
Marcus Garvey/ Universal Negro Improvement Association
Mary McLeod Bethune
A. Philip Randolph/ Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
Harlem Renaissance – and here’s another great site for it
Great Migration – see also here for the Chicago piece of the story, including the Chicago Defender newspaper
Josephine Baker
Bessie Smith
Langston Hughes
Alain Locke
Survey Graphic (March 1925): Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro (the link is to a preview on Google Books, not the whole thing)
Zora Neale Hurston
NAACP/ Niagara Movement
Congress on Racial Equality (CORE)
Martin Luther King, Sr.
Jackie Robinson – see also this remembrance from ESPN.com
