Group #1 Names:
Answer the following questions based off your initial reactions to the sources you are given.
- What can you identify in this picture? Who, what and where is in this picture?
- What messages or themes are shown in the picture?
- What don’t you know about these photographs? What questions do you have?
After being instructed to do so, use the second information sheet to answer the following:
- How has your understanding of the images changed? Have your feelings towards the images changed?
- How do these images relate to the American government? Did they impact the creation of laws/legislation?
- Why is this source significant to understanding civil rights and our government?
Prepare to present your sources, each group will have 2-3 minutes to present 1) Your initial reaction 2) The new information you learned 3) How it relates to US Government
NAACP members marching to the Capitol during legislative session - Tallahassee, Florida.
Photographed on March 27, 1964
Shown on Canal St. - now FAMU Way.
The NAACP planned the demonstration to protest the U.S. Senate filibuster over the civil rights bill.
The longest continuous debate in Senate history took place in 1964 over the Civil Rights Act. Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who had proposed the legislation, it was strongly advocated by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.Addressing a joint session of Congressjust after Kennedy’s death, Johnson urged members of Congress to honor Kennedy’s memory by passing a civil rights bill to end racial discrimination and segregation in public accommodations, public education, and federally assisted programs. In his address, Johnson declared, “we have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”
On June 10, a coalition of 27 Republicans and 44 Democratsended the filibusterwhen the Senatevoted 71 to 29for cloture, thereby limiting further debate. This marked the first time in its history that the Senate voted to end debate on a civil rights bill. Nine days later, theSenate passedthe most sweeping civil rights legislation in the nation's history.
The Civil Rights Act provided protection of voting rights; banned discrimination in public facilities—including private businesses offering public services—such as lunch counters, hotels, and theaters; and established equal employment opportunity as the law of the land.
When President Johnsonsigned the billinto law that same day in a nationally televised broadcast, he was joined by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been instrumental in leading the public mobilization efforts in favor of civil rights legislation. TheCivil Rights Act of 1964remains one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history.
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Group #2 Names:
Answer the following questions based off your initial reactions to the sources you are given.
- What can you identify in this picture? Who, what and where is in this picture?
- What messages or themes are shown in the picture?
- What don’t you know about these photographs? What questions do you have?
After being instructed to do so, use the second information sheet to answer the following:
- How has your understanding of the images changed? Have your feelings towards the images changed?
- How do these images relate to the American government? Did they impact the creation of laws/legislation?
- Why is this source significant to understanding civil rights and our government?
Prepare to present your sources, each group will have 2-3 minutes to present 1) Your initial reaction 2) The new information you learned 3) How it relates to US Government
Reverend C. K. Steele at the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church - Tallahassee, Florida
at 224 north Boulevard St., at about 9:30 PM on January 2, 1957
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"Rev. Charles K. Steele with the 4' cross that was burned at his church,. Most likely brought on by the front of the bus riding demonstrations the week before."
On May 26, 1956, two female students from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, sat down in the “whites only” section of a segregated bus in the city of Tallahassee. When they refused to move to the “colored” section at the rear of the bus, the driver pulled into a service station and called the police. Tallahassee police arrested Jakes and Patterson and charged them with “placing themselves in a position to incite a riot.”In the days immediately following these arrests, students at FAMU organized a campus-wide boycott of city buses. Their collective stand against segregation set an example that propelled like-minded Tallahassee citizens into action. As the boycott dragged on into the summer, the Tallahassee police continually harassed its organizers as well as rank-and-file members of the ICC, many of whom were FAMU students. Segregationists smashed windows at Reverend Steele’s house and burned crosses on numerous occasions in an attempt to intimidate the African-American community.
On May 29th,several leaders in the Tallahassee black community scheduled a meeting for later that night at the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, where the Reverend C.K. Steele was pastor. Steele was also the acting president of the Tallahassee chapter of the NAACP. The Tallahassee Inter-Civic Council (ICC) was organized, and Rev. Steele was elected its president. Upon being elected president of the ICC, Steele privately stated that he would have preferred the NAACP conduct any boycott, but he also recognized the need to have a locally based organization. This would ensure that boycott opponents could not make the commonplace charge that the protest was the result of outside agitation. The ICC’s stated goal was the immediate desegregation of the city’s bus service. Its methods were nonviolent but directly confrontational. The Council made three specific demands on the transit company: first, seating on the buses should be on a first-come, first-serve basis; second, African-Americans were to be treated with courtesy by white bus drivers; and finally, black drivers were to be hired to drive routes through the black community. It also began operating a carpool system to transport workers, most of them domestics employed in white suburban homes, during the boycott.
- “Freedom is on the march. We come up tonight out of the smoke of shotgun firing and the debris of broken windows to say the fight is still on, the war is not over...They have thrown rocks, they have smashed car windows, they have burned crosses. Well, I am happy to state here tonight that I have no fear of them and praise God I have no hate for them.”
- By phone, by mail, and sometimes by more dire means there were attempts to intimidate Steele. One of Steele’s sons, the Rev. Henry Marion Steele, recalled that rocks and sometimes gunfire were directed at the Steeles’ home on the corner of Boulevard and Tennessee Streets. “Bullet holes were still visible in the walls almost ten years later when the home was torn down,” Henry Steele said. And even in Steele’s own congregation at Bethel Missionary Baptist Church,
Group #3 Names:
Answer the following questions based off your initial reactions to the sources you are given.
- What can you identify in this text? Why was it written?
- What messages or themes are written about?
- What don’t you know about the text? What questions do you still have?
After being instructed to do so, use the second information sheet to answer the following:
- How has your understanding of the text changed? Have your feelings towards the text changed?
- How does this text relate to the American government? Did it impact the creation of laws/legislation?
- Why is this source significant to understanding civil rights and our government?
Prepare to present your sources, each group will have 2-3 minutes to present 1) Your initial reaction 2) The new information you learned 3) How it relates to US Government
Letter From Birmingham City Jail (Excerpts)
Martin Luther King, Jr.April 16, 1963
“In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: 1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; 3) self-purification; and 4) direct action. You may well ask, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.
My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.
I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; 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 that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you take a cross country 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” men and “colored”
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ “Councilor” or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direst action” who paternistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Shortly after King’s arrest, a friend smuggled in a copy of an April 12 Birmingham newspaper which included an open letter, written by eight local Christian and Jewish religious leaders, which criticized both the demonstrations and King himself, whom they considered an outside agitator. Isolated in his cell, King began working on a response. Without notes or research materials, King drafted an impassioned defense of his use of nonviolent, but direct, actions. Over the course of the letter’s 7,000 words, he turned the criticism back upon both the nation’s religious leaders and more moderate-minded white Americans, castigating them for sitting passively on the sidelines while King and others risked everything agitating for change. King drew inspiration for his words from a long line of religious and political philosophers, quoting everyone from St. Augustine and Socrates to Thomas Jefferson and then-Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren, who had overseen the Supreme Court’s landmark civil rights ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. For those, including the Birmingham religious leaders, who urged caution and remained convinced that time would solve the country’s racial issues, King reminded them of Warren’s own words on the need for desegregation, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” And for those who thought the Atlanta-based King had no right to interfere with issues in Alabama, King argued, in one of his most famous phrases, that he could not sit “idly by in Atlanta” because “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
On June 11, with the horrific events in Birmingham still seared on the American consciousness, and following Governor George Wallace’s refusal to integrate the University of Alabama until the arrival of the U.S. National Guard, President Kennedy addressed the nation, announcing his plans to present sweeping civil rights legislation to the U.S. Congress. The Civil Rights Address would be the kickstarter to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark piece of legislation that would pave the way for civil rights for all.
Group #4 Names:
Answer the following questions based off your initial reactions to the sources you are given.
- What can you identify in the first picture? What does the information tell you about voting groups?
- What do the two line graphs demonstrate?
- What message do these graphs send? Why do you think that is the case?
After being instructed to do so, use the second information sheet to answer the following:
- How does the supplementary information help your understanding of the data? Do they support each other?
- How do these images relate to the American government? Did they impact the creation of laws/legislation?
- Why is this source significant to understanding civil rights and our government?
Prepare to present your sources, each group will have 2-3 minutes to present 1) Your initial reaction 2) The new information you learned 3) How it relates to US Government
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
Why did there need to be a voting rights act in 1965?
Because states—particularly Southern states—had found ways to get around the 15th Amendment, which had guaranteed African American men the right to vote. Poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy and civics tests, as well as violence, made it virtually impossible for many black Americans to exercise their right to vote. Civil rights activists had challenged these restrictions in court cases, but in 1965, Congress determined that these case-by-case lawsuits were ineffective.
The key points of the voting rights act of 1965:
• No voting qualification, prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice or procedure shall be imposed ... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.
• The court will appoint federal examiners to enforce the guarantees of the 15th Amendment.
• No “test” (e.g., literacy or civics) or “device” (e.g., grandfather clause) may be used as prerequisites for voting.
• States that require special attention are those that most severely restricted voting rights before this 1965 law. The Voting Rights Act identified those states as those that used any “test or device” that limited voting based on race or color on November 1, 1964; or where less than 50 percent of people of voting age were registered to vote on November 1, 1964.
- Whenever one of the states identified above wants to change voter qualifications or voting procedures, it needs court approval to do so.
- Federal examiners will oversee voter registration in the states identified above.
- Federal examiners may, at the request of the attorney general, observe at voting sites and vote-counting sites.
- Poll taxes are illegal.
The Voting Rights Act gave African-American voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and vastly improved voter turnout. InMississippialone, voter turnout among blacks increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969.
Group #5 Names:
Answer the following questions based off your initial reactions to the sources you are given.
- What can you identify in this picture? Who, what and where is in this picture?
- What messages or themes are shown in the picture?
- What don’t you know about these photographs? What questions do you have?
After being instructed to do so, use the second information sheet to answer the following:
- How has your understanding of the images changed? Have your feelings towards the images changed?
- How do these images relate to the American government? Did they impact the creation of laws/legislation?
- Why is this source significant to understanding civil rights and our government?
Prepare to present your sources, each group will have 2-3 minutes to present 1) Your initial reaction 2) The new information you learned 3) How it relates to US Government