Debating Justice, Politics, and Culture in Black America, From the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter

What follows is a reading list based upon a writing-based history course that Austin McCoy taught in the Fall of 2015. While teaching the course, he relied heavily on primary sources and short secondary sources due to the stringent page limit (45 pages per week).

Here he has gently revised the syllabus. He includes a few more readings that enhance the list. The topics are listed in the order that were assigned. He added two topics – one on the Black Panthers and Donald Trump. He also included a Spotify playlist of music that inspired the class.

PDF Version: Black Lives Matter Reading List.

White Supremacy and Racial Identity

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, Excerpts from “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (2014) (Read parts I-IV).
• W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in Souls of Black Folk (1903).
• Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” (1969).
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Letter to My Son” (2015).

Civil Rights Movement: Direct Action

• Watch: Freedom Riders (2011).
• Ella Baker, “Bigger than a Hamburger” (May 1960).
• Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963).
• Patrice Cullors, “#BlackLivesMatter Will Continue to Disrupt Political Process,” The Washington Post, August 18, 2015.

Civil Rights Movement and Memory: From Rosa Parks to Selma

• Watch: Selma (2015).
• Jeanne Theoharis, “National Honor/Public Mythology: The Passing of Rosa Parks” and “‘Racism is Still Alive’: Negotiating the Politics of Being a Symbol,” in The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks (2013): vii-xvii; 233-244.
• Martin Luther King, Jr., “MIA Mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church,” December 5, 1955, from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
• Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the Dedication of Statue Honoring Rosa Parks – US Capitol,” February 27, 2103.
• Joseph A. Califano, Jr., “The Movie ‘Selma’ Has a Glaring Flaw,” Washington Post, December 26, 2014.
• Prathia Hall, “Bloody Sunday,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts from Women in SNCC (2010): 470-473.

Racial Violence, Police Brutality, and Urban Uprisings

• Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The Tangle of Pathology,” in The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965): 29-43.
• James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” The Nation (1966).
• Philip A. MacComb, “Who is Behind the Race Riots?,” National Review, September 20, 1966.
• Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1967): 1-29.

What We Want is Black Power: Debating the Direction of Black Protest

• Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots” (1963).
• Stokely Carmichael, “What We Want,” New York Times Magazine (September 1966).
• Richard Nixon, “Bridges to Human Dignity,” Human Events, May 25, 1968.
• Fran Sanders, “Dear Black Man,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade (1970).

The Black Panthers

• Watch: The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2016).
• Watch: Beyoncé, “Formation,” Super Bowl Performance (2016).
• Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (2010).
• Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, “Ten Point Program: What We Want, What We Believe” (1966).

Black Worker Rebellion in Detroit

• Read Selections of Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying and Thomas Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
• James Boggs, “The Challenge of Automation” (1963).
• Michael Hamlin, “Some Accomplishments of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,” in A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor: Black Workers Power in Detroit (2015).

Challenging the Second Wave: Intersectionality and Black Feminism

• Becky Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism,” Feminist Studies, 28: 2 (Summer 2002): 336-360.¹
• Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality,” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (2016).
• Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977).
• Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (1984).

Reparations

• Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations” (Read the rest of the essay).
• Robin D.G. Kelley, “For Reparations and Transformation,” Against the Current (January-Feburary, 2003).
• Cedric Johnson, “An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the White Liberals Who Love Him,” Jacobin (2016).

The Hip Hop Generation

• Read selections of Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (2005).
• Tricia Rose, “Bad Sistas: Black Women Rappers and Sexual Politics in Rap Music,” in Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1993).
• John McWhorter, “How Hip Hop Holds Blacks Back,” City Journal (Summer 2003).
• Sacha Jenkins, “The Eternal Illmatic” (2015).

Crime and the Carceral State

• Elizabeth K. Hinton, “A War within Our Own Boundaries: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State,” Journal of American History, 102: 1 (June 2015).
• Heather Ann Thompson, “Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” The Atlantic, October 30, 2014.
• Tricia Rose, “Public Tales Wag the Dog: Telling Stories about Structural Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Du Bois Review, 10: 2 (2013): 447-469.
• Lynn Norment, “Charles Rangel: Front-Line General in War on Drugs,” Ebony (March 1989): 128-134.
• Donna Murch, “Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?,” Boston Magazine, October 16, 2015.
• Michael J. Fortner, “Historical Method and the Noble Lie,” Boston Magazine, October, 23, 2015.

Black Sexual Politics

• Barbara Smith, “Soul on Hold” (1985).
• Cheryl Clarke, “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance” from This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981).
• Janet Mock, “I Was Born a Boy,” Marie Claire, May 18, 2011.

Black Politics in the 21st Century

• Angela Dillard, excerpt from “Malcolm X’s Words in Clarence Thomas’s Mouth” (2001).
• David Remnick, “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama,” The New Yorker, November 17, 2008.
• Adolph Reed, Jr., “Obama: No,” The Progressive, April 28, 2008.
• Gwen Ifill, “The Race-Gender Clash,” in The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, 70-88.
• Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” (2008).

21st-Century Black Feminist Politics

• Watch: Beyoncé’s 2014 MTV Video Music Awards Performance.
• Melissa Harris-Perry, “Introduction,” from Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, 1-23.
• Tamara Winfrey Harris, “All Hail the Queen?,” Bitch Magazine (2013).
• Brittney Cooper, “Feminism’s Ugly Internal Clash: Why the Future Is Not Up To White Women,” Salon.com, September 24, 2014.
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists (2015).

Campus Protest: From #BBUM to #Mizzou

• Selections from Thedemands.org (University of Michigan).
• Austin McCoy and Garrett Felber, “Viewpoint: Student Protest and Affirmative Action,” The Michigan Daily.
• Tanzina Vega, “Colorblind Notion Aside, Universities Grapple With Racial Tension,” New York Times, February 24, 2014.
• Dave Zirin, “Black Mizzou Football Players Are Going on Strike Over Campus Racism,” The Nation, November 8, 2015.

Narrating the Movement: Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter

• Department of Justice, “Report Summary” and “Background,” Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (2015): 1-10.
• Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014.
• DeRay McKesson, “Ferguson and Beyond: How a New Civil Rights Movement Began – and Won’t End,” The Guardian, August 9, 2015.
• Martha Biondi, “The Radicalism of Black Lives Matter,” In These Times, August 15, 2016.
• Ben Carson, “#BlackLivesMatter Misfire,” USA Today, September 3, 2015.

Race, Trump, and the 2016 Election²

• Brent Staples, “Donald Trump and Reconstruction Era Politics,” New York Times, March 3, 2016.
• Geoff Eley, “Fascism Then and Now,” Socialist Register, Vol. 52 (2016): 91-117.
• Greg Grandin, “Why Trump Now? It’s the Empire, Stupid,” The Nation, June 9, 2016.

Notes

1. I had students get into groups and reverse outline Thompson’s article. The activity was successful on two fronts – students learned how scholars articulated and proved their arguments with evidence. They also learned a history of feminism that challenged some of the stereotypes often perpetuated in public discourse. Return to text.
2. I chose Staples’s and Eley’s articles from Blain’s and Connolly’s “Trump Syllabus, 2.0.” Return to text.