The Long Civil Rights Movement Course Descriptor

Course Overview

This course aims to: probe key stages in black political protest and their intimate connections to wider contours of American and international history. It will advance students’ powers of analysis, of interpretation, and ability to devise, formulate and criticise arguments regarding modern history and develop an active understanding of how factors such as race, class, gender and generation have shaped responses to racial discrimination in different historical contexts.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Employability Skills

Teaching and Learning

This course has a dedicated Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) page with a syllabus and range of additional resources (e.g. readings, question prompts, tasks, assignment briefs, discussion boards) to orientate and engage students in their studies.

The scheduled teaching and learning activities for this course are:

Lectures/seminars 

40 scheduled hours – typically including induction, consolidation or revision, and assessment activity hours.

• Version 1: all sessions in the same sized group

OR 

• Version 2: most of the sessions in larger groups; some of the sessions in smaller groups

OR

Directed study 

4-12 scheduled hours, the exact number varying according to the balance of 1:1s, 2:1s, or small groups. The plan will be confirmed by the start of the course, taking into account student numbers and the proposed topics, readings, and specific tasks.

Faculty hold regular ‘office hours’, which are opportunities for students to drop in or sign up to explore ideas, raise questions, or seek targeted guidance or feedback, individually or in small groups. 

Students are to attend and participate in all the scheduled teaching and learning activities for this course and to manage their directed learning and independent study.

Indicative total learning hours for this course: 150 

Assessment

Both formative and summative assessment are used as part of this course, with purely formative opportunities typically embedded within interactive teaching sessions, office hours, and/or the VLE. 

Summative Assessments

In the written assignment students will gather data and analyse it with an understanding of the societal, economic and political context and an understanding of the various experiences of different social and ethnic communities. In the exam the students will employ knowledge of the social and political context and the experiences of various communities to answer questions related to the history of the Long Civil Rights Movement.

Further information about the assessments can be found in the Course Syllabus.

Feedback

Students will receive formative and summative feedback in a variety of ways, written (e.g. marked up on assignments, through email or the VLE) or oral (e.g. as part of interactive teaching sessions or in office hours).

Indicative Reading

Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is for a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• Sugrue, T. (2009) Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. London: Random House.
• Tuck, S. (2010) We Ain’t What We Ought To Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Ward, B. and Badger, T. (1996) The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. London: Macmillan.
• Journals: Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. (2005) ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past’. Journal of American History 91, 1233-1263

Electronic Resources

• Carmichael, S. (1966) ‘What We Want’. http://web.mit.edu/21h.102/www/Primary%20source%20collections/Civil%20Rights/Carmicha el.htm  
• Du Bois, W. E. B. (1919) ‘Returning Soldiers’. The Crisis, XVIII, p. 13. http://glc.yale.edu/returning-soldiers 
• Hearst Metrotone News Collection (1965) ‘TV Coverage of Selma to Montgomery March’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XArs06XavlE 

Indicative Topics

Note: Comprehensive and current topics for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative topics provided below are used as a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• The origins of Jim Crow segregation
• Marcus Garvey and black nationalism 
• The Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro 
• Popular protest during the Great Depression and Second World War 
• Martin Luther King Jr. and nonviolent protest 
• The March on Washington Movement 
• International protest movements during the Cold War 
• The rise of Black Power