Civil Rights Today: President Obama and Same Sex Marriage

Unless you're completely living under a rock, you probably heard something about gay marriage and President Obama yesterday.

Let's watch the ABC News video clip from yesterday.

Read the Wall Street Journal article with your partner.  Highlight the five most important sentences and create two open-ended discussion questions to bring to your group.

After your group discussion, go to the New York Times reaction board and post a comment.

Emmet Till

Essential Question:  What made Emmett Till's murder in 1955 different than previous incidents of violence against African-Americans?  What was the significance then?  What is the significance now?


Warmup:  What can we learn about the murder of Emmett Till from Bob Dylan's protest song Death of Emmett Till?  (Start video 40 seconds in)






To read the lyrics, visit Bobdylan.com

Who was Emmett Till and why was he killed?

Start at 4:40






Images from the case (PBS Eyes on the Prize)

STOP & JOT:  What made Emmett Till's murder in 1955 different than previous incidents of violence against African-Americans?  

The Trial:

Video clip from PBS American Experience:  The Murder of Emmett Till

Primary Source Analysis:

White House Memo filed by E. Frederic Morrow, the first African-American White House staff member

PICK TWO:

• What do you read that you didn’t expect?
• What powerful words and ideas are expressed?
• What feelings and thoughts does the primary source trigger in you?
• What questions does it raise?
• What can you learn from analyzing this?
• If someone created this, what would be different?

How did this incident shape young African-Americans?

• "Emmett Till and I were about the same age. A week after he was murdered... I stood on the corner with a gang of boys, looking at pictures of him in the black newspapers and magazines. In one, he was laughing and happy. In the other, his head was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets and his mouth twisted and broken. His mother had done a bold thing. She refused to let him be buried until hundreds of thousands marched past his open casket in Chicago and looked down at his mutilated body. [I] felt a deep kinship to him when I learned he was born the same year and day I was. My father talked about it at night and dramatized the crime. I couldn't get Emmett out of my mind..."      ~ Muhammed Ali, boxer
• "My memories are exact -- and parallel those of many others my age -- I felt vulnerable for the first time in my life -- Till was a year younger -- and recall believing that this could easily happen to me -- for no reason at all. I lived in Pennsylvania at the time."       ~ Julian Bond, civil rights leader and chairman, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and George School alum

STOP & JOT:  What was the significance then?  What is the significance now?

Additional resources:

PBS Timeline of Emmett Till case 

Separate but Equal: My Man Langston, Plessy vs. Ferguson, & Executive Order 9981

“I, Too” by Langston Hughes (1925)

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.

Besides,

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

SOURCE: Langston Hughes, "I, Too," Collected Poems by Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

 

 

Plessy vs. Ferguson

PBS has a terrific site titled The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow where we can learn about the landmark Supreme Court case, Plessy vs. Ferguson.

Click here for a quick video summarizing the significance of the case.

U.S. Supreme Court

PLESSY v. FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

Justice Henry Brown delivered the majority opinion of the Court:

… The object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power. The most common instance of this is connected with the establishment of separate schools for white and colored children, which have been held to be a valid exercise of the legislative power even by courts of states where the political rights of the colored race have been longest and most earnestly enforced.…

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. …

If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other's merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals. …If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.

Dark Laughter comic strip by Oliver W. Harrington, 1960

Source:  Library of Congress

Executive Order 9981

Source:  Truman Library

More resources:

•  Timeline for desegregation of the armed forces from the Truman Library

Activity:

Newspaper Blackout

 

Lynching :: Strange Fruit, Without Sanctuary, & a Mini-Project

Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves

Blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

The scent of magnolia sweet and fresh

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
for the rain to gather
for the wind to suck
for the sun to rot
for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

Composed by Abel Meeropol (aka Lewis Allan)

Originally sung by: Billie Holiday

"Between 1882 and 1903, 2,060 blacks were lynched in the United States. Some of the black victims were children and pregnant women; many were burned alive at the stake; others were castrated with axes or knives, blinded with hot pokers, or decapitated."                                                 

Amistad Digital Resource, Columbia University

Lynching Resources:

Statistics & Timelines:

• Lynching in America:  Statistics, Information, Images [use this site for choice A]

Photographs:

• Without Sanctuary [use this site for choice B]

Ida B. Wells: 

• Biography of Ida B. Wells

"One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap." ~ Ida B. Wells 

• Video about Ida B. Wells

PBS Site about Strange Fruit

Lynching mini-project overview and rubric

  

Examples of projects from previous classes:

Danielle's ecphrasis My Fading Family

Jake's ecphrasis I'm Sorry

Sara's ecphrasis Bad Romance

How to post your glog correctly on the blog:

• Grab the embed code (not the URL) from your glog.  
• Go to NEW POST here on the blog (you'll need to be logged in to Blogger).
• Choose HTML instead of Compose
• Paste the embed code
• Change the percentage in the code:  CHANGE SCALE =100 to SCALE=75, CHANGE WIDTH=960 to  720, CHANGE HEIGHT=1300 to 975

The Jim Crow Era: How did early movies shape ideas about race & gender?

The Birth of a Nation

1915

190 minutes long

*fast fact* - first movie to be shown in the White House
*fast fact* - original title was The Clansman

Clip #1:

Clip #2:

Wondering how African-Americans and their allies responded?

Encyclopedia of American Race Riots by Walter C. Rucker and James N. Upton