Fall 2013 - Undergraduate Course Descriptions
Description of Course:
This course will examine the origins of segregation and disfranchisement in the American South from the end of Reconstruction through the 1920s. Attention will be paid to both the legal and extralegal edifices upholding white supremacy including important legal cases, the social separation of the races, lynching and mob violence, sharecropping, convict labor, political disfranchisement and intimidation, and the evolution of a racist consumer culture. The course will also explore how African Americans resisted Jim Crow through organized political and social activism as well as on a day to day level.
--Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP
--Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction
--Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow
--Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920
--Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger)
--Also included are primary sources and articles.
Course Requirements/Evaluation Criteria:
Attendance, class participation in discussion, midterm, paper on the Waco lynching which also includes primary sources, and final exam.