AFAM 162 African American History: From Emancipation to the Present Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement have become embodied in each other. But in this lecture, Professor Holloway asks: what of the other activists in the struggle? What of the other organizations involved in the struggle? And what of the history of the struggle before King reluctantly emerged on the scene? By uncovering the histories of the Montgomery bus boycott, the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, the death of Emmett Till, the Greensboro student sit-ins, and the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one finds differing responses to violence and multiple approaches to attacking racial bias and discrimination. Professor Holloway also draws attention to the gender dynamics of the civil rights movement by considering the inner-workings of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama, the original motivating force behind the 1955 bus boycott, and the great importance of respectability to the movement. This lecture reveals that there was no single civil rights movement, that there were many activists working in a variety of different ways and with varying degrees of success, and that King was a complicated figure, both inspiring and stifling activism. Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing. Johnathan Holloway, African American History: From Emancipation to the Present (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (Accessed May 30, 2019). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

AFAM 162 African American History: From Emancipation to the Present In this lecture, Professor Holloway gives a political biography of Jesse Jackson as a way to help understand the shifting cultural politics of the 1960s, the rise of a different array of politics in the 1970s, and the high politics of the 1980s. Professor Holloway traces Jackson’s ascension into Martin Luther King’s inner-circle, his work in Chicago with Operation Breadbasket and then later with Operation PUSH, his reaction to King’s assassination, his national economic boycotts, and his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns. In the second half of the lecture, Professor Holloway turns to the national stage, surveying the political and social milieu around President Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan’s administrations, focusing specifically on the latter two. While Jimmy Carter diversified the executive branch of the federal government through White House appointments, Ronald Reagan had a more covert approach to racial politics. By claiming that the federal government was the real problem, and calling for a return to states’ rights, Reagan implicitly supported the centralizing power of racists like Bull Connor and organizations like the KKK. Thus, Professor Holloway explains, as public race baiting fell out of favor, conservatives like Reagan adopted a way of talking about race without ever mentioning it. Warning: This lecture contains graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing. Johnathan Holloway, African American History: From Emancipation to the Present (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (Accessed May 30, 2019). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA