HIST273

Description

This course explores the history of African American activism, beginning with the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s up until the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2012. As a contemporary history course, students will consider how recent effort to challenge racist violence, policies and practices, that some believed only made racial inequality worse. While the course looks at individuals, such as Angela Davis and Audre Lorde, it looks at the efforts of organizations such as the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, TransAfrica who were instrumental in the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the US, and Critical Resistance, which helped spawn a Prison Abolition movement in the late 1990s. The final part of the course will compare and contrast the BLM with the Black Power Movement, paying close attention to the role of art, mass media, and iconography as tools activist used in the history of the struggle for racial justice.