Summary: Today's primary focus will be the emergence of the African-American civil rights movement and its implications for American culture, particularly political culture. We will survey significant events of the civil rights struggle. We will discuss the impact of television and other media on the civil rights movement. We will consider the impact of the civil rights struggle on American notions of civic community, participatory democracy, and social justice. We will look at how participants in the civil rights movement drew on African-American cultural resources such as the black church and gospel music. If time permits, we will also briefly consider early developments in another movement that emerged out of the civil rights movement, the movement for women's liberation. Overall, today's topics reflect a transitional moment in American cultural life, from the consensus-based political cultural of the early 1950s to the activist-inclined political culture of the 1960s.

I. Introduction: The complex intersections of race, gender, class, generation, and region in the social and cultural ferment of the 1950s

A. Race, Class, and Rock 'n' Roll Music

B. The Emmett Till Case, 1955

1. generational accents: Till as an ordinary black teenager from Chicago

2. regional accents: Chicago versus Money, Mississippi

3. media accents: national news coverage of the case

4. consequences for the emerging civil rights movement

5. gender accents:

a. representations of Mamie Bradley

b. Gwendolyn Brooks' commentary on intersections of region, gender, and race in "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Menawhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon"

C. The Civil rights movement and other events that helped to establish a more critical and participatory moment in American cultural formation

II. Civil Rights

A. The Persistence of Racism

1. advances in the 1940s

a. Jackie Robinson desegregates baseball, 1947

b. Truman desegregates the military, 1948

2. discrimination in housing, jobs, education, politics, legal rights

B. Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 1954

1. Supreme Court enforces decision with "all deliberate speed"

2. dispute over integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957

3. arguably less important than Emmett Till's murder in galvanizing civil rights movement

C. Montgomery bus boycott, 1955

1. grassroots protest

2. Martin Luther King comes to the fore

a. relation to the Emmett Till murder and trial:

"I had passed spots where Negroes had been savagely lynched, and had watched the Ku Klux Klan on its rides at night. I had seen police brutality with my own eyes, and watched Negroes receive the most tragic injustice in the courts."

b. insight into the "varieties of injustice" in American society:

"I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. . . I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society."

c. leadership role in the movement:

"I neither started the protest nor suggested it. . ."

D.King's strategy of "militant nonviolence" becomes the model for a surging civil rights movement

E. Significant civil rights actions

1. Greensboro sit-ins, formation of SNCC in 1960

2. Birmingham demonstrations, 1963

a. showcased the violence of Southern traditionalists

b. television mediates the civil rights struggle for many Americans

F. Cultural impact of the civil rights movement

1. political culture: new idiom in politics, new vision of community

a. shift the idiom of American politics toward participatory democracy

b. vision of community: March on Washington, MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech, 1963

2. civil rights and African-American cultural resources

a. African-American churches and the civil rights struggle

b. African-American music

F. Generational Cross-Currents and the Dynamic Element of Youth

II. To be addressed more in section: women's experience in the postwar era (Recall Gwendolyn Brooks' poetry.)

A. Contradicitions in white, middle-class women's experience

1. feminism ebbed to its lowest point in the 1950s as Americans celebrated domesticity

2. more women received higher education

3. married women became secondary wage earners

a. confronted sex and wage discrimination on the job

b. carried the "double burden" of wage work and housework

4. suburbanization created a female ghetto

B. Feminism re-emerges

1. demographic shift begins in 1957

2. women respond to civil rights movement

3. early sign of dissent: Kennedy's President's Commission on the Status of Women (1961) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963)

III. Other challenges to consensus basis of postwar American culture, to be touched on next Monday:

A. Global events challenge United States' Cold War perspective

B. JFK elected, 1960

C. Pacifist organizations form

D. College students become more critical

E. Michael Harrington publishes The Other America (1962)

There comes a time when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired -- tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked around by the brutal feet of oppression . . . If you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love, in the history books that are written in future generations, historians will have to pause and say "there lived a great people -- a black people -- who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization."

Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream chiefly rooted in the American dream . . . one day the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood."