Rights of the Accused: Due Process as Protection for Disadvantaged Minorities
Most of the major advancements in due process protections coincided with the civil rights movement of the sixties. The Warren Court viewed the Constitution as a living evolving document, gaining moral authority on race issues in the 1950s and 1960s....
Ideals and Heroes
Former Secretary of Labor and university professor Robert Reich talks about growing up in the 1960's, during the height of the civil rights movement, with heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. Secretary Reich also...
Other America, The: Causes of the Civil Rights Movement
The fight against the racism of the Nazis in World War II raises the consciousness of Americans about racism in U.S. society. Black veterans return home with rising expectations, no longer willing to accept second-class status. During the Cold War i...
Other America, The: Civil Rights Movement Intensifies
The black community begins to challenge the constraints segregation imposes. A new mass-based political movement begins to coalesce among black members of urban southern churches. Martin Luther King emerges as chief spokesman and black women as the ...
Racial Politics and War
Professor of American studies and history Matthew Frye Jacobson talks about the evolution of attitudes towards African-Americans in the United States, as well as the growth of the civil rights movement. Professor Jacobson links both in part to chang...
Racism During World War II (Part One)
Professor of history Gary Gerstle talks about what he calls one of the great ironies of World War II and the twentieth century. "On the one hand," Professor Gerstle explains, "...the illegitimacy of racial prejudice was put before the American peopl...
Pressure Politics: Interest-group Society, An
The history of the nation is full of examples of people with shared beliefs coming together to influence the rules by which we are governed. America is an interest-group society. From the time of the Boston tea party to the civil rights movement and...
Frames of Reference: Group Identification and Political Participation
Groups are a more compelling frame of reference than ideology for most Americans. Religious differences, for example, can be a source of political solidarity within the group and a source of conflict without. During the 1960s the civil rights moveme...