Library Guides: Social Movements Resources- HI 341: Definitions of Freedom

Books in Schewe Library

American Ideas of Equality by Carl L. Bankston
Call Number: 305.509 B2189a
ISBN: 9781621965558
Publication Date: 2021-02-01
"Equality is a fundamental American value. The nation's Declaration of Independence declared equality as a self-evident foundation for political life and the pursuit of equality has continued to dominate policy debates in the twenty-first century. However, equality is a complex idea and it has had different meanings in different eras. Using a variety of data sources, this book describes how the views we hold regarding this fundamental national value developed as products of our cultural history from the origins of the American republic to 2020. It traces how cultural transmission, political and economic structures, and communication technology have shaped this core American value. "
Local People: the struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer
Call Number: 323.1196 D617
ISBN: 9780252021022
Publication Date: 1994-06-01
"
For decades the most racially repressive state in the nation fought bitterly and violently to maintain white supremacy. John Dittmer traces the monumental battle waged by civil rights organizations and by local people, particularly courageous members of the black communities who were willing to put their lives on the line to establish basic human rights for all citizens of the state. Local People tells the whole grim story in depth for the first time, from the unsuccessful attempts of black World War II veterans to register to vote to the seating of a civil rights-oriented Mississippi delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention."

Primary Source Articles and Reviews

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Tough Question for a New Test: What Does 'American' Mean? by Julia Preston for The New York Times (2007)

Online Resources

What It Means to Be American
What It Means to Be American is a national, multiplatform, multimedia conversation hosted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Arizona State University, and produced by Zócalo Public Square. We bring together leading thinkers, public figures, and Americans from all walks of life to explore big, visceral questions about how our nation’s past can help us understand its present and imagine its future. Through live public events in nine cities, widely syndicated humanities journalism, and robust partnerships with universities and national media outlets, we are asking and hoping to find many answers to the question, what does it mean to be American?

Database Resources

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Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Speaks on May 28, 1965, on Fostering Racial Pride and Pursuing Power
- "Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (1908–72) became the pastor at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the oldest Black church in the North, in 1936 after his father, the previous pastor, retired. Powell combined ministry with community activism, and he pushed both businesses and government to hire more Black people. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1944 and fought against the racism and segregation that was common across the country. He later rose to be chairperson of the powerful House Committee on Education and Labor from 1960 to 1967, and he also advocated for the Black Power movement when many civil rights activists condemned it. On May 28, 1965, he spoke at Chicago's Ebenezer Baptist Church and gave what he called a "Black Position Paper." In his address, he calls for a Black revolution that will profoundly "alter the face of white America," a revolution which includes fostering racial pride, pursuing "audacious" power, and becoming economically self-sufficient."
Domestic Policy: Government, Civil Rights, and Race Relations
- "The civil rights movement burst onto the American political scene in the 1960s. Before then the principal tactic in the fight against discriminatory laws was the lawsuit, usually filed by lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Southern resistance to court-ordered desegregation of public schools had been strikingly demonstrated in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to send U.S. Army troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a school-integration order. The successful bus boycott led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 was a preview of civil rights tactics of the 1960s. The next year King was among the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose purpose was to help provide an organizational base through which activist black clergy and their churches could mount nonviolent resistance to racism."

Social Movements Resources- HI 341: Definitions of Freedom

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Books in Schewe Library

Primary Source Articles and Reviews

Online Resources

Database Resources