Course Details

The beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement is generally put at 1955 with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, and it was centered in the Deep South in ensuing years. But the Washington, DC area saw a number of much earlier protests that, in retrospect, served as harbingers of later tactics. This two-session course will cover four such examples that took place between 1937 and 1953: two in the nation's capital involving notable but relatively little-known women (Pauli Murray and Mary Church Terrell), one in Virginia involving African Americans' exclusion from a public library, and an early challenge to segregated schools in Maryland.