Philip Morgan Slave Trade

Historian Philip D. Morgan explores the core experiences of slavery itself, including life on the African coast and on sugar plantations in the new world. He discusses the wide range of experiences that an enslaved person might experience in different countries during the height of the transatlantic slave trade.

Philip Morgan: The African Slave Trade, 1500-1800

Philip Morgan: The African Slave Trade, 1500-1800 from The Gilder Lehrman Institute on Vimeo.

Roots of Voudun and Slavery's Legacy in Ouidah

From the 17th to 19th centuries, millions of African people were sold into slavery, transported on ships to the Americas. With them came spiritual traditions including Voudun, which we now know as voodoo. Its roots are in the Dahomey kingdom on the West Coast of Africa, now the country of Benin.

The python temple in Ouidah, Benin, where voodooists invoke the "sacred"

We visit the Temple of Pythons and learn about Voudun religious practices, and witness some of the most important sites in the history of the slave trade.

We walk along a beach that was the single most highly-trafficked embarkation point for West African slaves headed over the Atlantic to the Americas. One million people were forced on to ships here, many transported to Haiti and Brazil, where Voudun transmuted into voodoo and Candombla.

Outsiders called this region the Slave Coast. Ouidah’s residents today call the former boarding platform on this otherwise idyllic beach the Gate of No Return.

Roots of Voudun and Slavery's Legacy in Ouidah

Benin's Dark Past of Slavery

BBC News, Benin, "Benin's Dark past of slavery," by Sue Branford: Few tourists reach Benin yet this West African nation has a remarkable story to tell about one of the most shameful episodes in history.

A massive, arched gateway, some 50 feet high, stands alone on the edge of one of the loveliest beaches in West Africa.

It is a striking - and in many ways a beautiful - structure, facing out across the Atlantic Ocean towards South America.

Yet it is also bleak beyond words.

Etched across the top of the arch are two long lines of naked, chained men disappearing into the sea.

Called the Gateway of No Return, it is a monument to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who were forced into slave boats on this beach, never to return.

I arrived at this gateway with a group of local historians. By the time I got there, I was choking back tears.

Not surprising really, as the monument comes at the end of a harrowing two-mile (3.2 km) trek from Ouidah.

Today Ouidah is an attractive town, the spiritual capital of Benin, with a thriving culture centred on the voodoo religion.

But once the very mention of Ouidah invoked fear among the local population.



Tree of Forgetfulness

The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and the French all had forts near this town, built to defend their trading interests.

And for more than 200 years, the main commodity they traded was people.

Slave traders rounded up men, women and children, at times trapping them with nets.

Their catchment area stretched deep into Africa, even as far as Ethiopia and Sudan.

Once caught the slaves were forced to walk in chains, hundreds of miles to Ouidah.

Once there, they were subjected to a brutal process of brainwashing.

Taken down the slave route that I followed, they were made to walk around a supposedly magical tree called the Tree of Forgetfulness.

Men had to go round it nine times, women and children seven.

This experience, they were told, would make them forget everything - their names, their family, and the life they had once had.

As if this was not enough, the slaves were then locked into a dark room, built to resemble the hulk of a ship.

In the local language this room was called Zomai, meaning literally: "There, where the light is not allowed."

Its foundations are still visible and the place still seems to exude evil spirits and terror.

Brazil's role

Old Portugese Slave Fort - Ouidah. Old Portugese Slave Fort. The Slave Route

After several weeks - or even months - in this hell hole, the slaves were packed in ships for the long crossing to the Americas.

One of the historians told me that most of the slaves went to Brazil, at the time still ruled by Portugal and that some Brazilians played an important role in the trade.

Benin, Oyo, Asante And Dahomey Were Slave Trading Tribes

The most infamous was Don Francisco de Souza, an extraordinary wheeler-dealer who, arriving penniless from Brazil, made a fortune out of slave-trading while living in Benin.

He was a colourful figure, allegedly having 99 wives and hundreds of children.

He inspired one of Bruce Chatwin's most famous novels, The Viceroy of Ouidah.

In all, Brazil received some four million slaves from Africa - though not all, of course, from Ouidah.

This was many more than were sent to the United States.

Cultural impact

Economically, the slaves did not prosper, for blacks remain by far the poorest ethnic group in Brazil.

But culturally their impact was huge.

I lived in Brazil for many years and almost everything that makes Brazil that vibrant, warm country that so many of us love seems to be linked to Africa.

Carnival, samba, Candomble, capoeira - all were created by the descendants of former slaves.

I have always known this, but it was not until my recent trip to Benin that I became aware of just how tenaciously the slaves must have clung to their culture.

Huge efforts were made to cut them off from their past but they failed.

The "tree of forgetfulness" did not work.

Future tourism

Today there is a new twist to the tale.

As yet, Ouidah is unspoilt. Few tourists reach this relatively remote area of West Africa.

But tour operators have spotted the strong combination of wonderful beaches, hot climate, historical sites and, for Europeans, no jet lag.

Moreover, Benin is a relatively safe country with low levels of violence. The people are friendly.

Tourism is just the kind of industry that President Yayi Boni, who came to office earlier this year, is keen to promote.

He was a development banker before entering politics and wants to modernise the country.

Ouidah has a remarkable story to tell and local people need jobs.

But let us hope that Benin does not repeat the mistakes of other developing countries.

Too often tourism has had harmful effects.

Local communities have been evicted from their land. Water resources have been squandered on golf courses.

The local culture has been turned into a vulgar tourist attraction.

It would be ironic indeed if Benin's extraordinary heritage was to open the way for another cycle of exploitation by outsiders.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday, 7 September, 2006 at 1100 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times

(source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/5321484.stm)


Tree of Forgetfulness

Cointelpro Documentary

Cointelpro Documentary, Part 1 of 6


Cointelpro Documentary, Part 2 of 6


Cointelpro Documentary, Part 3 of 6


Cointelpro Documentary, Part 4 of 6


Cointelpro Documentary, Part 5 of 6


Cointelpro Documentary, Part 6 of 6 (Black historian discusses Black community drug flooding)

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, "Black exodus from Southern segregation," on 24 October 2010, by Michael D. Schaffer: Half a century after the Civil War set African Americans free, another war gave them the chance finally to flee the brutal apartheid that had replaced slavery in the American South.

World War I disrupted the flow of immigrants from Europe to the United States, forcing industries in the North to begin looking for a new pool of cheap labor. They found it in the African Americans of the South, and sent recruiters into Dixie with a message of opportunity in the cities of the North.

The opportunity was more than just economic. It was a chance for a people, citizens but not fully free, to escape the system of legal segregation that demanded black deference to whites and often punished transgressions with death by lynching.

So began a migration that would long outlast the labor needs of World War I. For more than half a century, until the 1970s, millions of African Americans streamed out of the South toward the cities of the West and the North, including Philadelphia. Isabel Wilkerson tells their story superbly in The Warmth of Other Suns, a magnificent marriage of history and journalism. (The title phrase comes from a poem by the African American novelist and poet Richard Wright.)

"Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America," Wilkerson writes.



"The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. . . . It was the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free."

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing as a reporter for the New York Times in 1994, interviewed more than 1,200 people, all of whom had been part of the migration.

She settled on three to carry her story: Ida Mae Gladney, who left the cotton fields of Chickasaw County, Miss., in 1937; George Starling, who fled central Florida in 1945, a step ahead of irate orange growers ready to lynch him for trying to organize pickers; and Robert Foster, a surgeon who packed up his Buick Roadmaster and set out for California in 1953.

Wilkerson, now a journalism professor at Boston University, retraced the journeys of her three main characters, including Foster's epic, nearly sleepless, drive across the vastness of the Southwest at a time when interstates didn't yet exist and public lodging for blacks was scarce.

Alternating among her characters, Wilkerson draws a reader into her narrative as she weaves a verbal tapestry, spun from beautifully turned phrases and rich in detail. Here is how she describes Milwaukee, Gladney's destination:

"Milwaukee was a frank and clattering workhorse of a town, a concrete smokestack of a place with trolley cars clanking against a web of power lines and telephone cables filling the sky. Curls of steam rose from the rooftops and from the gray hulk of the Schlitz brewery over by the Cherry Street bridge."

Relying on all those hours of meticulous interviewing, Wilkerson fleshes out her characters as completely as if they were characters in a novel: Gladney is the indomitable matriarch, Starling the upright and indignant man who pushes back against a racist society, and Foster the striver, anxious that his achievements be properly acknowledged.

In Foster, Wilkerson found an especially fascinating character, a skilled surgeon and compassionate healer of enormous ego and enormous insecurity, obsessed with status symbols, addicted to gambling, and eager for approval not just from whites but from his in-laws, pillars of black society in Atlanta. She clearly likes him and just as clearly sees his flaws:

"He had a Napoleon complex, a southern complex, a baby-of-the-family complex. He had both a superiority and an inferiority complex, and, because he was born on Christmas Day, a Christmas baby complex."

The world that the black newcomers found in the North was far from being a heaven of racial amity, but it was light-years better than what they had left behind in the South. For one thing, they could vote, as Ida Mae Gladney found to her surprise in 1940. Back in the South, she would never have ventured to the polls. If she had, Wilkerson writes, "she would have been turned away for failing to pay a poll tax or not being able to answer a question on a literary test for which there was no answer, such as how many grains of sand there were on the beach. . . ."

Wilkerson argues that historians have not paid sufficient attention to the Great Migration, that it was seismic but silent, unorganized and spread out over decades.

"It would become," she writes, "the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century."

Not any longer. (source: Philadelphia Inquirer)

John Steinbeck on the New Orleans Desegregation Crisis

Observations of John Steinbeck on the New Orleans desegregation crisis

Esteemed American novelist John Steinbeck traveled through New Orleans in late 1960 and witnessed firsthand the resistance to school desegregation. Steinbeck described his experiences in his 1962 book, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Viking Press, 1962), 189, 193–95.

While I was still in Texas, late in 1960, the incident most reported and pictured in the newspapers was the matriculation of a couple of tiny Negro children in a New Orleans school. Behind these small dark mites were the law’s majesty and the law’s power to enforce—both the scales and the sword were allied with the infants—while against them were three hundred years of fear and anger and terror of change in a changing world. I had seen photographs in the papers every day and motion pictures on the television screen. What made the newsmen love the story was a group of stout middle-aged women who, by some curious definition of the word “mother,” gathered every day to scream invectives at children. Further, a small group of them had become so expert that they were known as the Cheerleaders, and a crowd gathered every day to enjoy and to applaud their performance. . . .

As I walked toward the school I was in a stream of people all white and all going in my direction. They walked intently like people going to a fire after it has been burning for some time. They beat their hands against their hips or hugged them under coats, and many men had scarves under their hats and covering their ears.

Across the street from the school the police had set up wooden barriers to keep the crowd back, and they paraded back and forth, ignoring the jokes called to them. The front of the school was deserted but along the curb United States marshals were spaced, not in uniform but wearing armbands to identify them. Their guns bulged decently under their coats but their eyes darted about nervously, inspecting faces. It seemed to me that they inspected me to see if I was a regular, and then abandoned me as unimportant.

It was apparent where the Cheerleaders were, because people shoved forward to try to get near them. They had a favored place at the barricade directly across from the school entrance, and in that area a concentration of police stamped their feet and slapped their hands together in unaccustomed gloves.

John Steinbeck

Suddenly I was pushed violently and a cry went up: “Here she comes. Let her through. . . . Come on, move back. Let her through. Where you been? You’re late for school. Where you been, Nellie?”

The name was not Nellie. I forget what it was. But she shoved through the dense crowd quite near enough to me so that I could see her coat of imitation fleece and her gold earrings. She was not tall, but her body was ample and full-busted. I judge she was about fifty. She was heavily powdered, which made the line of her double chin look very dark.

AP PHOTO ORIGINAL CUTLINE Women crowd the sidewalk and jeer as Mrs. James Gabrielle, with police escort, walks her daughter home after day in integrated William Frantz school in New Orleans, November 30, 1960. Few white children are in the school which one black girl attends. Crowd wants total white boycott.

She wore a ferocious smile and pushed her way through the milling people, holding a fistful of clippings high in her hand to keep them from being crushed. Since it was her left hand I looked particularly for a wedding ring, and saw that there was none. I slipped in behind her to get carried along by her wave, but the crush was dense and I was given a warning too. “Watch it, sailor. Everybody wants to hear.” Nellie was received with shouts of greeting. I don’t know how many Cheerleaders there were. There was no fixed line between the Cheerleaders and the crowd behind them. What I could see was that a group was passing newspaper clippings back and forth and reading them aloud with little squeals of delight.

Now the crowd grew restless, as an audience does when the clock goes past curtain time. Men all around me looked at their watches. I looked at mine. It was three minutes to nine.

Ruby Bridges entering school.

The show opened on time. Sound of sirens. Motorcycle cops. Then two big black cars filled with big men in blond felt hats pulled up in front of the school. The crowd seemed to hold its breath. Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw, dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little they were almost round. Her face and little legs were very black against the white.



The big marshals stood her on the curb and a jangle of jeering shrieks went up from behind the barricades. The little girl did not look at the howling crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those of a frightened fawn. The men turned her around like a doll, and then the strange procession moved up the broad walk toward the school, and the child was even more a mite because the men were so big. Then the girl made a curious hop, and I think I know what it was. I think in her whole life she had not gone ten steps without skipping, but now in the middle of her first skip the weight bore her down and her little round feet took measured, reluctant steps between the tall guards. Slowly they climbed the steps and entered the school.

Racist Cheerleaders

The papers had printed that the jibes and jeers were cruel and sometimes obscene, and so they were, but this was not the big show. The crowd was waiting for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school. And here he came along the guarded walk, a tall man dressed in light gray, leading his frightened child by the hand. His body was tensed as a strong leaf spring drawn to the breaking strain; his face was grave and gray, and his eyes were on the ground immediately ahead of him. The muscles of his cheeks stood out from clenched jaws, a man afraid who by his will held his fears in check as a great rider directs a panicked horse.

John Steinbeck

A shrill, grating voice rang out. The yelling was not in chorus. Each took a turn and at the end of each the crowd broke into howls and roars and whistles of applause. This is what they had come to see and hear. No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. It was indicated that they were indelicate, some even said obscene. On television the sound track was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. In a long and unprotected life I have seen and heard the vomitings of demoniac humans before. Why then did these screams fill me with a shocked and sickened sorrow? (source: http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/tu_bush_media.html)

Defying Dixie

The New York Times Book Review on 10 February 2008, "POLITICS ISSUE: Pathfinders," by Maurice Isserman:

The South, as its great historian C. Vann Woodward once noted, developed into the United States’ “most distinctive region.” Among its distinctions — bound up with but outlasting its peculiar institution of chattel slavery — were white Southerners’ preoccupations with human limitations, guilt and evil. Not for them the optimistic creed or “dream of perfection” associated with their Northern brethren. In that sense, Woodward argued, the South’s outlook was “a thoroughly un-American one.”

Which brings us to the central irony underlying “Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950,” by Glenda Gilmore, a native North Carolinian and the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale University. In the early to mid-20th century, Gilmore argues, it was primarily individuals and groups judged “un-American” by their contemporaries who took on the daunting task of bringing the South in line with the American “dream of perfection” — at least insofar as perfection could be measured by adherence to the promise of equal protection before the law. In a wide-ranging narrative that moves from Chicago to Moscow to Chapel Hill, N.C. (where Gilmore tends to linger affectionately), she introduces scores of dedicated, colorful and sometimes eccentric dreamers and agitators. They include Communists and Socialists, preachers of the social gospel, disciples of Gandhi, prominent academics and impoverished millworkers who, although mostly forgotten today, prepared the way, she argues, for the better known civil rights advocates of the 1950s and 1960s.

As Gilmore acknowledges, she is not the first to explore the notion of the “long civil rights movement,” stretching back many years before Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott. Readers of histories by John Egerton, Patricia Sullivan and others will recognize many of the characters and events discussed in Gilmore’s account. The return visit is mostly worthwhile thanks to her gift for vivid description and a number of interesting observations she offers along the way.

Two characters in her narrative particularly stand out. The first is Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a Dallas-born graduate of Tuskegee Institute who was one of the first blacks recruited into the American Communist Party. Dispatched soon afterward to Moscow as part of an official delegation, he lectured about race discrimination in the United States to an audience that included Joseph Stalin. In the style of many radicals of the era, he became a thorough Russophile: in Gilmore’s marvelous account, he walks down a street in a black neighborhood in Chicago greeting friends shortly after his return from his pilgrimage to Moscow, sporting a robochka — a Russian peasant blouse — as well as “knee-high felt boots and a small mustache.” Fort-Whiteman was instrumental in pushing American Communists to broaden their concept of class struggle to include the fight against racism. In the 1930s he moved permanently to Moscow, married a Russian woman and entertained black visitors who had come to see the vaunted Soviet experiment in action. Like many foreign Communists living in Moscow in that era, he ran afoul of the secret police, and died of starvation and mistreatment in a labor camp in 1939.

Pauli Murray came to a better end. Growing up in Durham, N.C., she early on developed a hatred for Southern segregation, fleeing to New York shortly after finishing high school. There she enrolled at Hunter College and graduated in 1933. Drawn into the city’s radical circles, she became, in turn, a Socialist, a pacifist and a feminist. In 1938, she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her great-great-grandfather, a white doctor and congressman, had been a trustee in the antebellum era, but the family connection did her no good; as soon as the admissions office discovered she was black, they fired off a rejection. She then wrote directly to Frank Graham, the university’s president, who had earlier signed a statement protesting expulsion of Jewish students from German colleges. “How can Negroes,” she asked, “defend our institutions against the threats of Fascism and barbarism if we too are treated the same as the Jews of Germany?” The liberally inclined Graham was sympathetic but, bound by North Carolina’s segregationist statutes, decided he could do nothing to help her. Murray went on to earn a law degree at Howard University and played a pioneering role in applying Gandhian tactics of civil disobedience to desegregate restaurants in Washington during World War II. (That she was also a cross-dressing lesbian who wound up an Episcopal priest majkes her an even more interesting character.)

Murray’s comparison of Nazi anti-Semitism to the Southern Jim Crow system was no ideological shot in the dark. Gilmore notes that in the 1930s, black Americans were more likely than whites to be alert to the Nazi threat. Civil rights proponents held up a “Fascist mirror” to the South, shaming some Southern white moderates into speaking out against officially enforced discrimination in their own backyard. Racial injustice began to be seen not merely as a matter of isolated acts of irrational prejudice but as a systematic denial of human rights and an affront to the nation’s official creed of liberty and equality — that is, “thoroughly un-American.” In fostering a politics that linked antifascism abroad with antiracism at home, the “radical left” (including but not restricted to Communists) thus “redefined the debate over white supremacy and hastened its end.”

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, a native North Carolinian and the C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, discusses her revealing new book, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, which looks at forgotten black and white southern activists, whose courageous work in the face of Jim Crow segregation laws, helped lay the foundation for the later civil rights movement

.

That final point is crucial to Gilmore’s argument. Unfortunately her belief that radical activists of the 1930s and 1940s “hastened” the end of Jim Crow in the postwar era is more asserted than demonstrated. And without such demonstration, Pauli Murray notwithstanding, “Defying Dixie” becomes an exercise in radical antiquarianism, a series of disparate essays built around interesting personalities, the whole rather less than the sum of its parts. (source: New York Times Book Review)

Maurice Isserman teaches history at Hamilton College. He is the author of “If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left,” among other books.

American Students Don't Know Much About US History

Vivian Malone Jones's effort to enroll at the University of Alabama led to George Wallace's infamous "stand in the schoolhouse door" in 1963.

According to the New York Times, "Students’ Knowledge of Civil Rights History Has Deteriorated, Study Finds," by Sam Dillon on 28 September 2011: When Julian Bond, the former Georgia lawmaker and civil rights activist, turned to teaching two decades ago, he often quizzed his college students to gauge their awareness of the civil rights movement. He did not want to underestimate their grasp of the topic or talk down to them, he said.

“My fears were misplaced,” Mr. Bond said. No student had heard of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, he said. One student guessed that Mr. Wallace might have been a CBS newsman.

Nazis block Jews from entering the University of Vienna.

That ignorance by American students of the basic history of the civil rights movement has not changed — in fact, it has worsened, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose board Mr. Bond sits. The report says that states’ academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem.

“Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history,” concludes the report, which is to be released on Wednesday.

Nazi storm troopers block the entrance to a Jewish-owned store.

The report assigns letter grades to each state based on how extensively its academic standards address the civil rights movement. Thirty-five states got an F because their standards require little or no mention of the movement, it says.

Eight of the 12 states earning A, B or C grades for their treatment of civil rights history are Southern states where there were major protests, boycotts or violence during the movement’s peak years in the 1950s and ’60s.

“Generally speaking, the farther away from the South — and the smaller the African-American population — the less attention paid to the civil rights movement,” the report says.

Gov. George Wallace attempted to defy the federal desegregation order on a hot June day

Alabama, Florida and New York were given A grades. Those states require relatively detailed teaching about the decade and a half of historic events, roughly bookended by the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling and the April 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the enactment of the federal Civil Rights Act a week later.

Many states have turned Dr. King’s life into a fable, said Mr. Bond, who now teaches at American University and the University of Virginia. He said his students knew that “there used to be segregation until Martin Luther King came along, that he marched and protested, that he was killed, and that then everything was all right.”

When Alabama Governor George Wallace stepped aside, Vivian Malone Jones entered the auditorium to register for classes.

Alabama, Florida and New York require teaching not only about Dr. King but also about others like James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi; Medgar Evers, the rights organizer murdered the following year in Jackson, Miss.; and Malcolm X, the Muslim minister who challenged the movement’s predominantly integrationist goals.

Some experts in history education criticized the report’s methodology. Fritz Fischer, a professor at the University of Northern Colorado who is chairman of the National Council for History Education, said it was unfair to give Colorado and some other states an F because of vague state history standards, when they are required by state constitutions or laws to leave curriculum up to local districts.

The national guard ordered Gov. George Wallace to step aside and escorted Vivian Malone and James Hood into Foster to become Alabama's first African-American students to register for class.

“The grading system they came up with does a disservice in putting the focus on requirements that certain states are unable to meet and will never be able to meet,” Dr. Fischer said.

Even though Colorado’s standards barely mention the civil rights movement, some Colorado schools teach the civil rights movement thoroughly, he said. “I’ve been in classrooms and watched them teach about the sit-ins and about the controversies between Martin Luther King and Malcolm,” he said.

The report is by no means the first to sound an alarm about nationwide weaknesses in the teaching of American history.

Over the past decade, students have performed worse on federal history tests administered by the Department of Education than on tests in any other subject. On the history test last year, only 12 percent of high school seniors showed proficiency.

The law center’s report noted that on that federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, seniors were asked to read a brief excerpt from the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, including the phrase, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Only 2 percent of the seniors were able to state that the ruling had been prompted by a school segregation case.

“I appreciate that they are shining a light on this,” said Kathleen Porter-Magee, a senior director at the Fordham Institute, a conservative Washington research group that produced its own report card on states’ American history standards this year. “We found that U.S. history standards were generally mediocre to awful, and this report finds the same thing.”

Even in schools that try to teach history rigorously, the civil rights movement may get short shrift because in the traditional chronological presentation of United States history, teachers often run out of time to cover post-World War II America, said Maureen Costello, a director at the poverty law center who oversaw and edited the report, titled “Teaching the Movement: the State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011.”

One reason the center decided to produce the report now is that 2011 is the 50th anniversary of crucial 1961 events, including the freedom rides. (source: NY Times)

Movie: The Intruder "I Hate Your Guts!"

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A 1962 film directed by Roger Corman, after a novel by Charles Beaumont, starring William Shatner. The story depicts the machinations of a racist named Adam Cramer (portrayed by Shatner), who arrives in the fictitious small southern town of Caxton in order to incite townspeople to racial violence against the town's black minority and court-ordered school integration.

The film was shot in southeast Missouri. Some of the production took place in East Prairie and Charleston (two towns in Mississippi County, Missouri). Before it was finished, local people objected to the film's portrayal of racism and segregation. Parts of the film were later filmed in Sikeston, Missouri.


Shame (1962)