Task 1: Watch the Introductory Video to this Unit (5 minutes)

Task 2: Review the provided videos and attached links for the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960's (20 minutes)

Task 3: Complete a Timeline by Selecting FIVE (5) Significant Civil Rights Moments Throughout the Decade (1960 - 1969) to Show Shifting Interests of Americans in the 1960's (25 minutes)

1. Go to Canva Timeline to Create Your Timeline OR 

2. Use the Timeline on Google Classroom

   1. Include the Date,  a Title, an Image and Description for each of the events/entry selected

Task 4: Submit Completed Timeline to Google Classroom

It was Feb. 1, 1960, when four black students sat down at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and ordered coffee. As TIME reported, “the white patrons eyed them warily, and the white waitresses ignored their studiously polite requests for service.”

Six years had passed since the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown vs. The Board of Education declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional — separate facilities were inherently unequal, argued Chief Justice Earl Warren — but Southern states (and even some cities in the North) clung desperately to their traditions of racial exclusion. Challenging Jim Crow through the legal system was a gradual, piecemeal process, and large numbers of Americans were growing impatient.

The four young men, freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, remained seated until closing time, and returned with 300 more students a few days later, determined to integrate the whites-only five-and-dime. (https://time.com/3691383/woolworths-sit-in-history/ )

Weeks earlier, King had scolded Life magazine photographer Flip Schulke for trying to assist protestors knocked to the ground by authorities instead of snapping away. “The world doesn’t know this happened because you didn’t photograph it,” King told Schulke, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Race Beat.” This time, however, television cameras captured the entire assault and transformed the local protest into a national civil rights event. It took hours for the film to be flown from Alabama to the television network headquarters in New York, but when it aired that night, Americans were appalled at the sights and sounds of “Bloody Sunday.” 

Around 9:30 p.m., ABC newscaster Frank Reynolds interrupted the network’s broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg”—the star-studded movie that explored Nazi bigotry, war crimes and the moral culpability of those who followed orders and didn’t speak out against the Holocaust—to air the disturbing, newly arrived footage from Selma. Nearly 50 million Americans who had tuned into the film’s long-awaited television premier couldn’t escape the historical echoes of Nazi storm troopers in the scenes of the rampaging state troopers. “The juxtaposition struck like psychological lightning in American homes,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in “The Race Beat.”  (https://www.history.com/news/selma-bloody-sunday-attack-civil-rights-movement )

During 1956, a group of Southern senators and congressmen signed the “Southern Manifesto,” vowing resistance to racial integration by all “lawful means.” Resistance heightened in 1957–1958 during the crisis over integration at Little Rock’s Central High School. At the same time, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights led a successful drive for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and continued to press for even stronger legislation. NAACP Youth Council chapters staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters, sparking a movement against segregation in public accommodations throughout the South in 1960. Nonviolent direct action increased during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, beginning with the 1961 Freedom Rides.

Hundreds of demonstrations erupted in cities and towns across the nation. National and international media coverage of the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against child protesters precipitated a crisis in the Kennedy administration, which it could not ignore. The bombings and riots in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 11, 1963, compelled Kennedy to call in federal troops.

On June 19, 1963, the president sent a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28 roused public support for the pending bill. After the president’s assassination on November 22, the fate of Kennedy’s bill was in the hands of his vice president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the United States Congress. (https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/civil-rights-era.html )

During the less than 13 years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the modern American Civil Rights Movement, from December, 1955 until April 4, 1968, African Americans achieved more genuine progress toward racial equality in America than the previous 350 years had produced. Dr. King is widely regarded as America’s pre-eminent advocate of nonviolence and one of the greatest nonviolent leaders in world history.

Drawing inspiration from both his Christian faith and the peaceful teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. King led a nonviolent movement in the late 1950’s and ‘60s to achieve legal equality for African-Americans in the United States. While others were advocating for freedom by “any means necessary,” including violence, Martin Luther King, Jr. used the power of words and acts of nonviolent resistance, such as protests, grassroots organizing, and civil disobedience to achieve seemingly-impossible goals. He went on to lead similar campaigns against poverty and international conflict, always maintaining fidelity to his principles that men and women everywhere, regardless of color or creed, are equal members of the human family.

Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Nobel Peace Prize lecture and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” are among the most revered orations and writings in the English language. (https://thekingcenter.org/about-dr-king/ )