This course will examine the history of African-American protest movements. Students will learn in rough outline about African-American struggles for freedom from the earliest slave revolts to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. We will examine slave insurrections such as Gabriel’s Rebellion (considered perhaps the largest slave conspiracy in Southern history), black abolitionism (with a focus on the strategies of David Walker, Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass), and the anti-lynching movement. Students will read and analyze the political writings of seminal black thinkers such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey. African-American contributions to the arts and music as exemplified in the Harlem Renaissance will form an important complement to the study of political and social activism. The course will end with a consideration of the recent progress of African-American rights viewed through the influence of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

Students will engage such questions as:

• Who organized these struggles or joined these movements?
• Why have African-American protests emerged at particular points in time?
• What institutions and resources are necessary for a movement to develop?
• What tactics and strategies—moral suasion, legislation, accommodation, confrontation, political violence—have been adopted by different movements?
• Have some of these strategies been more successful than others?
• What changes have these movements brought about?