History 474B

Devine

Civil Rights Study Questions

Allen J. Matusow, “Civil Rights: Triumph and Retreat”

1. How did Martin Luther King win northern support for black voting rights in the South? Why did organizations like SNCC resent him and his strategy?

2. How did Martin Luther King and President Johnson work together in bringing about a voting rights bill in 1965?

3. To what extent did the voting rights act achieve its purpose in the South after 1965?

4. How did the federal government implement school desegregation after 1965? What role, if any, did President Johnson play?

5. Why were “freedom of choice” plans inadequate in bringing about desegregation of schools?

6. How did the Moynihan Report explain the persistence of black poverty? Why did it meet such sharp criticism?

7. Why did the summer of 1965 mark a turning away of public support from Johnson’s civil rights agenda?

8. How were housing discrimination, segregated schools, and lack of jobs all related in thwarting black economic progress?

9. Why did King have such difficulty achieving civil rights successes in Chicago?

10. Why does Matusow refer to Johnson’s fair housing law as “toothless”?

11. Why did both King’s and Johnson’s efforts to combat employment discrimination fail to achieve much success?

12. Why was progress made against employment discrimination despite the fact that government played no major role?

13. What evidence emerged by the late 1960s that blacks’ problems were sometimes based more on class than on race?

14. What caused the white backlash that began after 1966? Why did Johnson feel obligated to retreat from civil rights?

Allen J. Matusow, “Black Power”

1. Why did SNCC turn away from the ideal of integration by the mid-1960s?

2. Why did racial tensions occur between white volunteers for Freedom Summer and SNCC staff members?

3. Why did SNCC end its alliance with white liberal Democrats in 1964?

4. How did the commitment to non-violent protest affect SNCC workers?

5. What was the “Tarzan complex”? How did it worsen black-white relations in SNCC?

6. What role did sex play in eroding black-white cooperation in SNCC?

7. How did the emergence of Stokely Carmichael change the course of SNCC? Why did his slogan “black power!” prove problematic?

8. Why did “black nationalism” seem hard to define (note that “Africa” is not a nation, but a continent)?

9. Why did poor blacks in the ghetto gravitate toward Malcolm X? If he had no concrete political program to offer and no original economic program why was he so popular?

10. Why did poor blacks in the ghetto subscribe to the teachings of Franz Fanon? What were his views on violence and why, according to Matusow, did they justify ghetto riots?

11. What were the pluralistic, cultural, and revolutionary interpretations of “black power”? Why, according to Matusow, was each incompatible with the others?

12. Who was ‘the New Ghetto Man”? How did his emergence relate to the string of riots in the nation’s major cities during the mid-1960s?

13. Why does Matusow believe that interpreting the riots as either revolutionary or nationalist was to indulge in fantasy or wish fulfillment?

14. How did SNCC fare under the leadership of Carmichael and H. Rap Brown?

15. How, if at all, did the Black Panthers advance the civil rights agenda? How, if at all, did the alliance between the Black Panthers and SNCC advance the civil rights agenda?

16. Why did the Black Panthers get so much attention if they were, according to Matusow, “a handful of blacks with a mimeograph machine”? Why were white radicals so attracted to them? Should they have been?

17. Why, according to Matusow, did the violent fantasies of black nationalists and revolutionaries amount to nothing? How did the majority of African Americans feel about civil rights by the end of the 1960s?

Stephanie R. Rolph, “Courting Conservatism”

1. What public relations strategies did the Citizens’ Councils pursue in order to persuade white audiences to sympathize with the South’s racial system? Why did they avoid the “raw language” of white supremacy and distance themselves from the issue of race?

2. Rolph observes that Forum denied agency within the black community (26). What does she mean by this? Why did the Citizens’ Councils ignore the circumstances of southern blacks and focus instead on left-wing agitators and “outsiders”?

3. How did the Citizens’ Councils employ scientific “experts” and the writings of conservative intellectuals to defend the South’s racial system?

4. How did guests on Forum try to connect segregation with conservative ideology? Why did the Citizens’ Councils want to make this connection?

5. How did guests on Forum express opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and explain the riots of the mid-1960s?

6. Why did the Citizens’ Councils blame the media for the racial unrest of the 1960s? What purpose did this serve?

7. According to Rolph, denying that blacks genuinely supported the protests in the South was “foundational” to the Citizens’ Councils’ publicity strategy. All of their arguments against the civil rights movement seemed to flow from this premise. Why was this premise so important to their campaign?