Black Lives Matter

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Black Lives Matter will center on the struggle for Black equality which stands as a unique and epoch-making saga in the quest for equal rights and human dignity. It surveys the lives of people who have suffered from racial and ethnic discrimination in the USA and throughout the world. This struggle had and still has domestic, national, and international dimensions. In this course, we will investigate the origins and flowering of the “Black Lives Movement ” tracing it from the “Civil Rights Movement” in America and study the developments and outcomes of the struggle to secure equal rights for African Americans. We will make the necessary links between the African American experience and the broader human rights issues. The course will use primary sources (many are now in book form) to chronicle both legal barriers and legal milestones related to the issues. We will examine violent acts against African Americans and both violent and nonviolent forms of resistance to discrimination. We will follow the everyday actions of the American people to secure equality for the descendants of former slaves. Special emphasis will be paid to the united efforts of African Americans, whites, and people of other ethnic backgrounds who have played prominent roles in the African American journey, from slavery to freedom and beyond. We will follow a thematic route to view the major events in the last decades of the 19th century to the “Civil Rights” decade of the 1960s to the Black Lives Movement of the 2000s. Visual presentations, shorts movies, documentaries, African American cultural expressions (especially music), and the study of actual events will be central to the class. All are encouraged to read newspapers (you can get your home paper on line) and to listen to newscasts short as we will discuss relevant recent events related to our topics.