From lectures and readings, elites and ordinary people figured prominently in struggles for freedom and equality. Which group mattered the most in your reading of this history?

Dear Writer,

I hope you can carefully and thoroughly complete this paper for me, as it is my history midterm and is crucial to my grade. I really appreciate your help! Additionally, the deadline for this paper is Thursday at 12 PM, so I hope you can send it to me before then.

I will provide you with the instructions my professor has given, along with the six required readings you need to use. You do not need to reference any external sources.

Here are my professor’s requirements: Please read carefully. In four (4) to five (5) pages, answer one (1) of the following questions:

Chroniclers of this history have termed the civil rights movement “a movement of movements.” In this essay, I would like you to consider the relative weight of the various strategies and tactics that seemed most evident during the roughly three decades we considered this quarter. To which ones did activists gravitate and why?

From lectures and readings, elites and ordinary people figured prominently in struggles for freedom and equality. Which group mattered the most in your reading of this history?

Activists steeped in a range of ideological perspectives were active in efforts to advance civil rights and economic opportunity. How best would you categorize this range of interests? Across the decades we’ve considered thus far, which sect do you think figured most prominently in the trajectory of protests? And why?

Note:

Your essay should include a broad survey of the decades we have covered thus far and demonstrate a critical engagement with a range of readings and lecture materials over the arc of the first half of the quarter. It is recommended that you reference at least five (5) sources—from the readings and lectures—that demonstrate the breadth of the evidentiary foundation of your essay. You need not reference any outside sources.

Your essayist should include concrete examples—people, organizations, references to specific actions and arguments, etc.—to advance historical interpretations. Thoroughly proofread and copyedit your essay. As per the rubrics laid out in the syllabus, we will take a very dim view of—among other things—students’ failure to embrace active voice constructions in sentences, imprecision in language, misspellings, incorrect verb tenses, and factual errors. Be spare and strategic in your use of textual quotes. Format: (last name of the author, page no.), (Gadsden, date), (Meineke, date). Your paper should be uploaded to the main Canvas course site by Thursday, February 6, 2025, by 12:00 pm.

Readings：

Thomas A. Guglielmo, “A Martial Freedom Movement: Black G.I.s’ Political Struggles during World War II.” Journal of American History 104, no. 4 (2018): 879–903. [NU Search]

Thomas Guglielmo, “‘Red Cross, Double Cross’”: Race and America’s World War II-Era Blood Donor Service,” Journal of American History 97, no. 1 (2010): 63-90. [NU Search]

Carol Anderson, “The White Man’s Burden Has Not Been Very Heavy”: the NAACP’s anticolonial struggle against South Africa, 1946-1951 in Bourgeois Radical: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960

Kevin K. Gaines, “Pauli Murray in Ghana: The Congo Crisis and an African American Woman’s Dilemma,” in American African in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era.

Brett Gadsden, “‘He Said He Wouldn’t Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus’: The Shifting Terms of the Challenge to Segregated Public Education, 1950-1954,” The Journal of African American History 90, no. 1/2 (2005): 9–28.

Nico Slate, “Between Utopia and Jim Crow: The Highlander Folk School, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Racial Borders of the Summer Camp, 1956–1961,” Journal of American History, Volume 109, Issue 3, December 2022, 571–595

Last Completed Projects