The Opening to the Sixties: The Black Freedom Movement

 

Required Reading:

Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, 23-45

Excerpt from I’ve Got the Light of Freedom by Charles Payne

Documents: Mississippi Violence, 1961-1962

 

Recommended websites:

“The First Freedom Ride:” Bayard Rustin On His Work With CORE  

Jack O’Dell on Fighting Racism in the 1940s

“I Wasn’t Interested In Living In The United States If I Wasn’t Going To Be In The Movement:” Jack O’Dell on Civil Rights Organizing

Greensboro Sit-ins website 

Hear John Lewis describe his experience on the Freedom Rides  

Sit-ins, Freedom Rides Website Library of Congress exhibit

An Analysis of the Racial Situation in the South in 1960 as Civil Rights Activism Increased

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive 125 oral histories, including those who opposed the movement

Freedom Ride 2001 –songs and other good links

1963 Woolworth Sit-In – violence continues

Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement 

Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (the need for direct action, not politics as usual

Abbreviated version of Letter from a Birmingham Jail http://www.triadntr.net/~rdavis/mlkbirm.htm

Martin Luther King Papers Project – chronologies, speeches, sermons, documents, lesson plans, liberation curriculum; one of my favorites is Drum Major Instinct (see sermons link)

Voices of the Civil Rights Era - http://webcorp.com/civilrights/voices.htm 

:” Fannie Lou Hamer On The Mississippi Voter Registration Campaign

“And This Happened in Los Angeles:” Malcolm X Describes Police Brutality Against Members of the Nation of Islam

 

1960s Chronology (this is somewhat more detailed than the one at the end of America Divided)

Timeline of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Movement  http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/timeline.html

Selected dates in Civil Rights History Timeline http://www.sitins.com/timeline.htm