Civil Rights Era, Sixties and Beyond: Yale Lecture Notes

Today we will learn and reflect on stories from the Civil Rights struggles of the
Sixties, which were a continuation of the struggles of earlier generations of black
leaders and civil rights activists after the Civil War.
Our primary source will be lecture notes from the Yale University undergraduate
class lectures by Professor Holloway for his African American History class, these
are the other videos where we explore stories from these Yale lectures. These
videos have a warning that the physical and sexual violence common in these years
may disturb some students of history.
In our prior videos on the Yale lectures on African American History we reflected on
slavery and the abolitionist movement, how the blacks were instrumental in the
Civil War struggle to abolish slavery, how the Civil Rights reforms of Reconstruction
were undone by the institution of the Jim Crow legal system that denied blacks the
right to vote, the right to due process, the right to true equality under the law, and
the early Civil Rights leaders before the 1960’s Civil Rights Era.

The Union soldiers may have won the battles of the Civil
War, but the true Civil War to change racial attitudes is a
war that is being fought to this very day.
At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for
this video. Feel free to follow along in the PowerPoint
script we uploaded to SlideShare. Please, we welcome
interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn and
reflect together!

https://youtu.be/kmLg8CDjOOY
https://youtu.be/89ulb20cy8Q
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Yale Lecture Notes: Civil Rights After WWII
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We will be retelling the best stories from the lecture
notes from the Yale University undergraduate class
lectures by Professor Holloway for his African
American History. These stories are in rough
chronological order, we encourage you to listen his
lectures to connect them to the continuous history.

MURDER OF TEENAGER EMMET TILL
Professor Holloway tells us,
“Especially brutal is the story of Emmett Till, a
fourteen-year-old boy, sent from Chicago to stay
with his family in Mississippi. The allegation is that
he whistled one day at a white storekeeper’s wife
when she walked past. Others have countered
saying he had a stutter and would often lisp as a
result. That night he is abducted and beaten. One of
his eyes is gouged out. He is wrapped in barbed
wire and tied to farm equipment before being
thrown over a bridge. When they find him, his body
is sent surreptitiously up to Chicago. His mother
insists on having an open casket at the Chicago
funeral and the images shock the country. Mose
Wright, Emmett Till’s uncle, points out in court the
people who came to get Emmett Till from him,
which meant he could no longer live in Mississippi.”

Professor Holloway continues,
“I was having lunch with a former colleague from a rural Louisiana, and the
subject of Emmett Till came up. He said he was fourteen or fifteen years old when
Emmett Till was murdered, and he knew then that he had to leave the South as
soon as he could, he knew there was no hope for ‘a black man in the Deep South.’
Now there was a court case. It was an all-white, all male jury. The jury deliberates
for sixty-seven minutes. One juror said later, ‘It wouldn’t have taken so long if
they hadn’t stopped to get a soda.’ The jury finds the defendants not guilty,
although everybody knew who did it.”

MELBA BEALE, ATTEMPTED RAPE, AND
DESEGREGATION OF LITTLE ROCK SCHOOLS
Melba Beals, who would be one of the brave black
teenagers of the Little Rock Nine who ran the racist
gauntlets daily to integrate Central High, tells a
horrific story when she was twelve years old.

“The day the Supreme Court
hands down the Brown vs Board
of Education ruling overturning
the Plessy vs Ferguson notion of
‘separate but equal’, mandating
desegregation in American
schools, Melba’s teachers
warned their black students, ‘Go
straight home. Don’t take any
shortcuts. Just go straight
home.’”
Melba would discover the
reason for this warning.

Melba writes in her memoir, “As I
entered the persimmon field, I sank
deep into my thoughts, but a few
steps past the big tree at the front of
the path, I heard a rustling sound. I
stood perfectly still, looking all
around. I didn’t see a soul. Suddenly,
as I came near to the end of the
field, a man’s gravel voice snatched
me from the secret place in my head.
‘You want a ride, girl?’ He didn’t
sound at all like anybody I knew.
There is was again, that stranger’s
voice calling out to me. ‘Want a
ride?’”

Melba continues her memoir,
‘Who is it?’ I asked, barely able to squeeze the words out.
‘I got candy in the car, lots of candy.’
I crept forward, and then I saw him—a big white man, even
taller than my father, broad and huge, like a wrestler. He was
coming toward me fast. I turned on my heels and fled in the
opposite direction, back the way I had come.
‘You’d better come on and take a ride home, you hear me girl?’
‘No sir!’ I yelled, ‘No, thank you,’ but he kept coming.

A cotton plantation on the Mississippi, 1884
“My heart was racing almost as fast as my feet. I couldn’t hear anything except
for the sound of my saddle shoes pounding the ground and the thud of his
feet close behind me. That’s when he started talking about ‘niggers’ wanting
to go to school with his children and how he wasn’t going to stand for it.”

Cotton pickers in the field
“My cries for help drowned out the sound of his words, but
he laughed and said it was no use because nobody would
hear me. I was running as fast as I could. The lace on my
shoe came untied and my feet got tangled. As I hit the
ground, I bit down hard on my tongue. I felt his strong
hands clutch my back. I bolted up, struggling to get away.”

“He pulled me down and turned me on my back. I
looked up into his face, looming close above me like
the monster on a movie screen. I struggled against him,
but he was too strong. He slapped me hard across the
face. I covered my eyes with my hands and waited for
him to strike me again. Instead, I felt him squirm
against me, and then I saw him taking his pants down.”

In the Land of King Cotton, Picking, 1909
“In my house, private parts were always kept private. I couldn’t
figure out what he was doing, but I knew it had to be bad. I
scratched and kicked and thrashed against him with every
ounce of strength I could muster. His huge fists smashed hard
against my face. I struggled to push him back and to keep the
dark curtain of unconsciousness from descending over me.”

Picking Cotton, by William Gilbert Gaul, circa 1890
“The big white brute shouts, ‘I’ll show you niggers the Supreme
Court can’t run my life,’ he said, as he–as his hand ripped at my
underpants. A voice inside my head told me I was going to die, but
there was nothing I could do about it. White men were in charge.”

Professor Holloway tells us:
“Someone comes to her rescue within
about four or five seconds of this
moment, before she’s actually raped.
One of her classmates she didn’t really
know that well knocks the guy over the
head with a brick and she is able to
escape to safety. Thus begins her
journey towards becoming one of the
Little Rock Nine. These are the
memories of a twelve-year-old girl.”

The Supreme Court in Brown ruled that school
districts had to be desegregated with “all deliberate
speed”, which in the Deep South means never. A few
years later the NAACP selects nine students to
integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

“The problem
we all live with”,
by Norman
Rockwell, 1960,
Ruby Bridges
entered first
grade under
court-ordered
desegregation
of New Orleans
public schools

“The NAACP is focusing on
Arkansas because it seemed to
be one of the most progressive
states in the South on these
issues. The nine who were
selected were amazing students,
academically gifted, coming from
the right families who comported
themselves in the right way.
There’s fierce local resistance. The
governor, Orval Faubus, calls in
the Arkansas National Guard to
prevent integration.
President Eisenhower, very unhappy about the whole scene, sends in the 101st
Airborne Regiment to force the issue, and he does it not because he believed in
integration, but because he believed in the federal government’s right to assert itself.
This is a states’ rights versus federal rights issue for Eisenhower.”
Faubus speaks to crowd protesting integration of Little Rock schools

“The troops ushered in the students after they had
already tried to integrate the school before but
were harassed by mobs outside of the building. The
troops could go with the students up to the door of
the classroom, but in the classroom, or in the
bathroom, or in the cafeteria, all hell broke loose.
One student had lye thrown in her face and was
almost permanently blinded. They were attacked,
books were thrown down, food poured on them,
but they could not respond. The one student who
did respond got kicked out, at which point they said,
‘One nigger down; eight more to go,’ trying to get
these students out of the school. Houses were
bombed, people were shot at, folks lost their jobs.
Now think about all this. What is it that’s being
asked of these children? And they are children..”

Professor Holloway continues:
Going back to Melba Beals,
there’s a few items from her
diary entry, New Year’s Day in
1958, that allow us to ask
some pretty important
questions. Four different
items, selected from a longer
list is, one, “to behave in a
way that pleases Mother and
Grandma,” two people who
were very central in her life.
“To keep faith and understand
more of how Gandhi behaved
when his life was really hard;
to pray daily for the strength
not to fight back.”
Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division escort African-American
students to Central High School in Little Rock in September 1957,
after the governor of Arkansas tried to enforce segregation.

And the entry that, the resolution
that she, that she put as number
one, was to “do my best to stay
alive until May 29th,” the end of the
school year. I mean, think about it:
NAACP activists, grown women and
men, are making sure the children
stay in school, despite the violence
they suffer. And it’s very fair to ask,
is it appropriate for sixteen-year-
olds to feel the need to write in
their diaries that the most
important New Year’s resolution is
to “do my best to stay alive” until
the end of the school year? What
are the adults asking the children to
do for the sake of the movement?
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1959. Rally at the state capitol, protesting the
integration of Central High School.

“Now one final note about the school year and Little
Rock. The governor was so upset about the public
relations disaster that accompanied the school’s
desegregation, that he decided to shut down Little
Rock public schools the following year. The
integration of the school, this great moment of civil
rights victory of American exceptionalism, lasted
one year, and then the public schools were shut
down.”

Nine students leave Central High, Little Rock,
Arkansas, under U.S. Army escort, 1957

Excerpt: “There is plenty that we have
not been taught about Brown,” decided
seven decades ago, and “how it
continues to impact us. We know about
Linda Brown and Ruby Bridges,” and the
other brave students crossing the colored
line. “But we don’t know about the
100,000 exceptionally credentialed Black
principals and teachers illegally purged
from desegregating schools in the wake
of Brown.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/17/brown-board-education-downside-00032799

FREEDOM BUS RIDERS
“In 1961 CORE, the Congress of
Racial Equality, organizes a new
round of freedom rides. Members
of SNCC, students from Yale and
other places in Connecticut, jump
on these integrated buses and
head on South. Once they cross
into the deep South, the buses are
attacked by smoke bombs, tires are
slashed. As people run out of the
buses to get away from the smoke,
they are met by mobs who beat
them with their fists and metal
poles. The buses are torched.
Other buses are sent down.” A mob of white people beat Freedom Riders in Birmingham. This picture
was taken by a local journalist who was beaten and his camera smashed.

“Eventually, the buses arrive down in
Birmingham, Alabama, where Bull
Connor, the Commissioner of Public
Safety, knows they’re coming, knows
there’s a mob waiting for them at the
bus station, and does not offer police
protection. He lets the students and
riders get beaten senseless for fifteen
minutes before releasing the police.
And people said, “Well, why did you
do such a thing?” He goes, ‘It was
Mother’s Day. You can’t take a man
away from his mother. You know,
they needed to have time spent with
their mother. You know, they would
get there in time.’”
Freedom Riders arrested for protesting.

MARTIN LUTHER KING IN BIRMINGHAM
Professor Holloway says,
“King comes to Birmingham and
willfully gets arrested. He knows he’s
going to get arrested. He’s trying to
brew up crisis. They throw King into
solitary. There’s no word coming from
him. This is actually terrifying. This is an
era when people would disappear, and
King being such a high-profile person
was not protected from disappearing.
Coretta Scott King is frantic, wanting to at least get reassurances that her husband’s alive, not
just safe but alive. President Kennedy gets involved and seeks guarantees of King’s safety. While
King is in jail, a number of moderate white clergy in Birmingham are upset that King is coming in
from out of town stirring up trouble. They publish a newspaper ad telling King to slow things
down, to calm down, to lower the temperature.”
Walter Gadsden being attacked by dogs on May 4, 1963.

https://youtu.be/PqFAUEXbi8k
“King responds by writing one of the great
protest documents and letters, and that’s
the Letter from Birmingham Jail, one of
the most important documents in
American protest history.”

MARTIN LUTHER KING TELLS
OF THE SUFFERING OF BLACKS
Martin Luther King
persuasively exclaimed: “We
have waited for more than 340
years for our constitutional
and God given rights. The
nations of Asia and Africa are
moving with jet-like speed
toward gaining political
independence, but we still
creep at horse and buggy pace
toward gaining a cup of coffee
at a lunch counter. Perhaps it
is easy for those who have
never felt the stinging darts of
segregation to say, ‘WAIT.’”
Little Rock, 1959. Rally at state capitol, protesting
the integration of Central High School.

Martin Luther King then tells us of the vicious
treatment of blacks in the Deep South, which
was similar to the cruelties and persecutions
the Jews faced in the Holocaust: “But when
you have seen vicious mobs lynch your
mothers and fathers at will and drown your
sisters and brothers at whim; when you have
seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even
kill your black brothers and sisters; when you
see the vast majority of your twenty million
Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage
of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,
then you will understand why we find it
difficult to wait.”

King continues, “But when you suddenly
find your tongue twisted and your speech
stammering as you seek to explain to your
six year old daughter why she can't go to
the public amusement park, and see tears
welling up in her eyes when she is told that
Fun-town is closed to colored children, and
see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning
to form in her little mental sky, and see her
beginning to distort her personality by
developing an unconscious bitterness
toward white people; when you have to
concoct an answer for a five year old son
who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white
people treat colored people so mean?,’
then you will understand why we find it
difficult to wait.”
Protestors in Birmingham in May 1963,
being hit by a high-pressure water hose

King continues, “When you take a cross county
drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night
in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile
because no motel will accept you; when you are
humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs
reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name
becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes
"boy" (however old you are) and your last name
becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are
never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are
harried by day and haunted by night by the fact
that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe
stance, never quite knowing what to expect next,
and are plagued with inner fears and outer
resentments; when you are forever fighting a
degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness,’ then you will
understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

“There
comes a
time when
the cup of
endurance
runs over,
and men
are no
longer
willing to
be plunged
into the
abyss of
despair.”
Selma Protest, by Ted Ellis

Professor Holloway says:
What is the pace of change? It’s
going too fast for white moderates.
Not going nearly fast enough for
African Americans and white
activists. So, King writes the Letter
from Birmingham Jail over Easter
weekend in 1963. Meanwhile,
marches are being organized in
Birmingham, organized from the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, to
try to call attention to the general
plight that African Americans face in
Birmingham, the injustice, injustice
of the situation.
King arrested for protesting treatment of blacks in Birmingham

“Bull Connor responds, quite
famously, “I want to see the dogs
work,” and then, “Look at those
niggers run.” As marches are
organized, he would release the dogs.
You’ve seen the images, of course.
Open up the fire cannons. They
actually had a tank, a police tank, that
was brought out to terrorize the
citizens. A decision is made by King
and his circle to raise the stakes. And
by raising the stakes, that means
using children.”

“By the end of the first day,
children marching in defiance
of orders, leaving school, a
thousand children aged
between six and eighteen
years-old are thrown in jail. By
the next day, the number
doubles. Robert F. Kennedy, he
was leading a civil rights
agenda for his brother, John F.
Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy is
beside himself. He could not
believe that King would risk
these children’s lives, as he
put it, for the sake of more
media coverage, more
negative press.”
VP LBJ and AG RFK with MLK and other civil rights leaders, June 22, 1963

“This is what he was doing, there is
no doubt about it, that King is trying
to antagonize the situation and
horrify the nation by revealing what
Bull Connor would actually do, and
Bull Connor took the bait. He
doesn’t care. Birmingham becomes
a media circus, as people from
around the country are horrified at
what they bear witness to. With all
the media around, a truce is
negotiated. Lunch counters open to
blacks, they become integrated.
Promises are made that blacks are
going to get hired in clerical and
sales positions, thus avoiding
economic boycotts.”
Congress of Racial Equality and members of the All Souls Church,
Unitarian located in Washington, D.C. march in memory of the 16th
Street Baptist Church bombing victims.

“But that doesn’t mean there is peace.
Martin Luther King’s brother’s house is
bombed. The hotel that was a staging
ground for a lot of the organizers, who
were coming in from out of town, the
hotel was bombed. Federal troops, Robert
F. Kennedy convinces his brother, “You’ve
got to bring federal troops if you want to
have stability.” So federal troops come and
occupy Birmingham to keep the peace.”
Robert F Kennedy speaking to civil
rights demonstrators in 1963

MARTIN LUTHER KING: I HAVE A DREAM
Martin Luther King gave this speech on the
March on Washington:
“So even though we face difficulties of
today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It
is a dream deeply rooted in the American
dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will
rise up and live out the true meaning of its
creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-
evident, that all men are created equal.’
I have a dream that one day on the red hills
of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and
the sons of former slave owners will be able
to sit down together at the table of
brotherhood.”
Martin Luther King Jr. delivering the speech at the
1963 Washington, D.C., Civil Rights March.

Martin Luther King continues his speech:
“I have a dream that one day even the
state of Mississippi, a state sweltering
with the heat of injustice, sweltering
with the heat of oppression, will be
transformed into an oasis of freedom
and justice.
I have a dream that my four little
children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the
color of their skin but by the content of
their character.
I have a dream today!”
Pictured are: (standing L-R) director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice Matthew Ahmann, Rabbi Joachim
Prinz, SNCC leader John Lewis, Protestant minister Eugene Carson Blake, CORE leader Floyd McKissick, and labor union leader
Walter Reuther; (sitting L-R) National Urban League executive director Whitney Young, chairman of the Demonstration Committee
Cleveland Robinson, labor union leader A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins

Later in the speech he says:
“In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s
capital to cash a check. When the architects
of our republic wrote the magnificent words
of the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence, they were signing a
promissory note to which every American
was to fall heir. This note was a promise that
all men, yes, black men as well as white men,
would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable
Rights” of Law–of ‘Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.’ It is obvious today that
America has defaulted on this promissory
note, insofar as her citizens of color are
concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred
obligation, America has given the Negro
people a bad check, a check which has come
back marked ‘insufficient funds.'”

Further in the speech Martin Luther King says:
We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro
is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of
police brutality. We can never be satisfied as
long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of
travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the
highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot
be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility
is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can
never be satisfied as long as our children are
stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their
dignity by signs stating: ‘For Whites Only.’ We
cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in
Mississippi cannot vote, and a Negro in New
York believes he has nothing for which to vote.
No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be
satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like waters, and
righteousness like a mighty stream.'”

MARCH ON SELMA,
ALABAMA
“The situation in Dallas
County, where Selma is
located, is really quite
astonishing. In Dallas
County, out of 15,000
people who are registered
to vote, only 350 are black,
in a state with a majority
black population. In
Alabama in general, over
three quarters of eligible
blacks are still off the
voting rolls, the highest
percentage in the South.”

“So, Martin Luther King goes down there to
announce a new voter registration drive,
knowing that he could bait the sheriff pretty
easily. Rallies are organized, marches are
planned. In the middle of February, a
peaceful SCLC rally in a neighboring area
was attacked by the police. During the
melee, twenty-six-year-old Jimmie Lee
Jackson shields his mother who’s being
beaten by a state trooper, and he’s shot in
the stomach and dies. Of course, the police
account differs. But this happens in from of
news camera, and several reporters from
NBC are attacked.”

“A plan evolves
immediately to march
from Selma, where Jimmie
Lee Jackson was murdered,
from Selma to
Montgomery, the state
capital, fifty miles away. On
March 7th, the chairman
of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee,
John Lewis, leads a march
of six hundred protesters
over the Edmund Pettus
Bridge. The disruption of
the march when the police
beats the protestors is
captured on live TV and
shown across the nation.”

“Thousands flocked to Selma as a protest
was announced, ‘We will march again’
from across the country, black, white,
doesn’t matter. They all come to Selma
to right this injustice. This day becomes
known as ‘Bloody Sunday.’”
Another little-known story about the
second more peaceful Selma march is
that of a grandmother who was shuttling
march participants back to the beginning
point. While she was driving her station
wagon some good old boys pulled up
beside her, windows rolled down, and
blew her away with a shotgun.
Alabama State Troopers attack civil rights demonstrators
on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.

FREEDOM SUMMER MURDERS
During the summer of 1964 activists
were in Mississippi encouraging local
blacks to register to vote. Three young
activists, two white, one black, traveled
to the town of Longwood to talk to a
congregation about setting up a
Freedom School to assist with voter
registration. When they did not call in
at the agreed upon time that
afternoon, they were reported missing.

Their smoldering car was found
and reported to the FBI. Local law
enforcement said they knew
nothing. This became a national
story, LBJ ordered four hundred
Navy divers to search the canals of
Mississippi for their bodies. LBJ
was likely not surprised when the
divers were unable to find the
bodies of the three missing boys,
but they did find the bodies of six
other Mississippi blacks who were
likely victims of other lynchings.
Perhaps some locals were worried
that other bodies of lynched blacks
would be discovered, because they
provide the FBI a helpful tip.
Remains of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner on August 4, 1964

The lynch mob who murdered
the youngsters included the
local sheriff and other
members of the local Ku Klux
Klan chapter. Only the black
kid was beaten, but all three
were shot and buried in an
earthen dam by a backhoe.
Autopsies indicated that one
of the kids had dirt in his
lungs, which meant he had
been buried alive.
https://www.nrm.org/MT/text/MurderMississippi.html
Murder in
Mississippi,
by Norman
Rockwell,
1965

VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965
“In the summer of 1965, LBJ is going out
on a limb to become the civil rights
president. On August 6th of 1965, he signs
the Voting Rights Act, after an incredible
effort to get it through. And the Voting
Rights Act prohibited states from imposing
literacy requirements as obstacles for
accessing the ballot box. It’s the most
successful way of cutting out the vote.
And, most importantly, it allowed the
attorney general to send federal examiners
into any election where they thought
voting rights might be curtailed.”

Professor Holloway
continues,
“The Voting Rights Act does
not give anybody the right
to vote. It gives the federal
government the authority
to protect the right to vote.
It brings into bold relief the
federal government’s ability
and right to supersede in
local affairs, which has been
the bone of contention
since the Voting Rights Act
was passed.”
(Update, the Supreme Court
has recently weakened the
powers of this act.) President Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks at the
signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965

“The Voting Rights Act has, if you look
forward from the moment of its passage in
August sixty-five, makes a clear change.
Within four years of its passage, three-fifths
of adult blacks are registered to vote. It’s an
astonishing shift. Between 1964 and 1969,
the number of registered black voters in
Alabama goes from less than twenty percent
to over sixty percent of the population. In
Mississippi, it goes to less than seven percent
of the population to over two-thirds of the
population, within five years. It’s a seismic
shift, especially when you consider the
number–the numbers we’re talking about in
terms of the African American population.”
Presidents signing amendments to Voting Rights Act

THE CENTRAL PARK JOGGER
“In New York City there was the very famous Central
Park jogger case. A white woman goes jogging in
Central Park at night, investment banker. She’s
attacked by teenage boys. The press likened the boys
to a “roving pack of wolves.” Donald Trump took out
full-page ads calling for the death penalty. The mayor
referred to them as monsters.
Thirteen years later in 2002 Matias Reyes confesses to
raping the young woman, and his DNA matched.
Another instance of profound police ineptitude
because they had the guy the whole time, essentially,
and the young men who were kind of raising hell in
Central Park, but they weren’t rapists, many of them
languished behind bars for quite some time.”
The full-page advertisement was taken
out by Trump in the May 1, 1989, issue
of the Daily News.

RODNEY KING BEATING
“The Rodney King beating took place in
1991. Rodney King, sky high on drugs,
engages in a high-speed chase with the Los
Angeles police department. The police are
upset. The police arrest Rodney King, and
they also beat him, too enthusiastically.
Rodney King suffers a fractured skull, a
broken leg, and internal injuries. The Rodney
King beating makes media history because a
bystander records the brutal beating on a
video camera, which is played over and over
on the news. Bowing to public pressure, two
weeks later four police officers are charged
with assault, but the jury acquits them,
sparking six days of riots.”

“During those riots occurs the story of
Reginald Denny. Reginald Denny, a
white guy hears that his friends are in
trouble, caught near the vortex of the
riot. He’s going to go help them. He’s a
truck driver. His truck is stopped, and
some thugs pull him out, and they start
beating him with a brick, trying to kill
him. Television cameras are focusing
on these black guys attacking the
innocent white truck driver.”
Thousands of federal troops patrolled Los Angeles
to restore order.

“What most people don’t realize is the fact
that the people who saved Denny were some
older blacks who saw this happening on T.V.,
knew the intersection, got in their car and
drove over to save him, saved him, and took
him to the hospital. Later King was telling
people afterwards, you know, “Quit using me
as a political football. I don’t want to be used
in this way. Stop it.” But he had lost control
over his own virtual projected image,” and
was unable to stop the riots.

WHAT WAS ACCOMPLISHED IN THE STRUGGLE FOR
CIVIL RIGHTS?
The issues of slavery, abolition, emancipation, and
black civil rights have dominated American politics
since the 1830’s. These racial issues continue to
dominate up the current day, causing the shift of
southern and other conservative white voters from
the Democratic Party to the Republican Party as the
fulfillment of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

From the 1830’s to the 1870’s abolitionists and
Radical Republicans, with help from black slaves,
strove and struggled for black Americans to share in
the American dream, shedding the blood of
thousands and thousands on the battlefields of the
Civil War, only to temporarily give up the struggle,
allowing white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan to
take control of their South.

What was accomplished? Eric Foner, the renowned
Civil War historian, notes that at least black
Americans gained their personal dignity, nobody
owned them, blacks did not have to work in gangs
under the whip of an overseer, they were allowed to
marry at the courthouse, their families would not be
broken up at a moment’s notice as happened so
often during slavery.

Emancipation
from
Freedmen's
viewpoint,
illustration
from Harper's
Weekly 1865

Throughout the twentieth century black civil rights leaders never
gave up. Eleanor Roosevelt, with FDR and other liberals, were
able to make many small advances during the time of the
Depression and World War II. These Civil Rights gains accelerated
when the Civil Rights Acts restored the rights of blacks to vote
and restored their other civil rights. Under the Jim Crow regime
intermarriage was condemned as miscegenation and was illegal
in many states. In the decades following the Supreme Court
decision overturning these Jim Crow miscegenation statutes,
intermarriage has become common.

Slavery is not dead. Slavery may never die in America. We
are guilty of condoning slavery when our minimum wage
workers working a full forty hours do not earn enough to
buy decent food, decent clothes, and have a decent roof
over the heads of their family. Who cares if we have
freedom of speech and freedom of worship if you are
starving in the streets? FDR, when we were fighting the
fascists in World War II, in his Four Freedoms speech,
proclaimed that everyone in the world should also enjoy
freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Freedom of Speech
Freedom of Worship Freedom From Fear
Freedom From Want
The Four Freedoms

And the most basic freedom from fear is freedom
from lynching, and the hope that, in America, we
never go back to the days when blacks could be
lynched with impunity, when the local sheriffs and
deputies condoned or participated in the lynchings.

SOURCES:
Jonathon Holloway was a Yale professor whose chosen academic field is
black history, a topic he chose as a teenager. These are his
undergraduate lectures on African-American history. As you can see, the
first six lectures cover this history through Reconstruction, the
remaindering nineteen courses cover the history of Jim Crow and the
Civil Rights Era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp6mjKumW2g&list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyqnC6Gj5VCZERhhy9CC1S6
Jonathon Holloway was a
Yale professor whose
chosen academic field is
black history, a topic he
chose as a teenager. These
are his undergraduate
lectures on African-
American history.
Classroom notes and suggested reading:
https://oyc.yale.edu/NODE/46

Professor David Blight’s lectures for the Civil War and
Reconstruction Era covered the years 1845-1877, so they
preceded the period of this video, but we was a good
source for our first three videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXXp1bHd6gI&list=PL5DD220D6A1282057
Professor
David Blight’s
lectures on The
Civil War and
Reconstruction
Era from 1845
through 1877.
Classroom notes and suggested reading:
https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119

Wondrium has recently released, in 2022, a video on civil rights
through the years of Jim Crow. We also have a video of Civil
Rights through Paintings, that also uses a Wondrium course on
conventional Civil War history by Thomas Gallagher.

We have another video that documents how the Nazi lawyers
studied the Jim Crow legal system when drafting the
Nuremburg Race Laws leading to the persecution of the Jews
under Hitler, proving there is a distinct link between white
supremacy and Naziism.

https://www.meetup.com/Reflections/

To find the source of any direct
quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
YouTube Description has links for:
• Script PDF file
• Blog
• Amazon Bookstore
© Copyright 2021
Blog and YouTube Description
include links for Amazon books
and lectures mentioned, please
support our channel with these
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Civil Rights Era, Sixties and Beyond: Yale Lecture Notes

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