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Essay Instructions: Hist-152, Sections 051 and 052

Howell Raines, My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered, Penguin, reprint, 1983.

Due at the beginning of class, Dec. 8th.

You are required to write one 4-to-6 page analytical paper (1250 to 1500 words, 4 pages minimum) based on selections from My Soul is Rested by Howell Raines. The paper should be focused around a central thesis which you will then support with arguments and evidence based on the book, and only the book. Do not use outside sources! (Do not answer each part of the question separately in your paper. Instead, integrate your thoughts on all of the questions’ parts into one thesis.)

All papers must be typed or word-processed in 10 or 12-point fonts and double-spaced, with one inch margins. You must cite correctly all direct quotations or paraphrased material. (You may use either footnotes or endnotes.) Papers will be evaluated on the strength of your historical arguments and content, how well you have used the book, and your composition (i.e., spelling, grammar, sentence structure). I would recommend that you write a rough draft before you complete the final version of each paper.

Question:
Between 1941 and 1968, several organizations (Congress of Racial Equality or CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC) became important leaders in the Civil Rights Movement in America. Using various interviews in Raines’ book, write an essay about the changes in a Civil Rights Movement in these years. In your essay, be sure to include a discussion of the following questions:
What tactics did these organizations use, and how and why did these tactics change over time?
How did both African Americans and whites respond to the activities of these organizations?
The book ends with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Do you think the Civil Rights Movement was successful by this time? Why or why not?
Include a comment on the advantages and disadvantages of using oral interviews to reconstruct and interpret history.

Study Questions: use the following questions to help you understand the various interviews in the book.
Why and how did Raines conduct these interviews? What was his purpose?
Why and how did the various civil rights organizations use Gandhi’s technique of passive resistance?
Why was the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 so successful?
How and why was the SCLC founded? Why was Martin Luther King Jr. elected president? How did the various organizations view King over the years?
Why were so many religious leaders involved in the civil rights movement?
What was the origin of the 1960s sit-ins? Why did they spread so rapidly?
Why did SNCC form?
What were Freedom Rides and what did they achieve? How did Mississippi try to “bankrupt” CORE through their reaction to the Freedom Rides?
Why was it so difficult for the Civil Rights Movement to desegregate Birmingham?
How did state and local authorities try to keep blacks from voting?
How did TV and media coverage of civil rights marches and demonstrations affect the success of the movement?
Why was Selma to Montgomery march of 1965 organized? What was its result?
How did the movement’s workers convince black and white citizens to register to vote? What was the reaction of both blacks and whites to African-American voter registration, particularly in Mississippi?
How did whites try to organize resistance to integration? How did individual whites resist it?
How effective was SCLC in Atlanta in the mid-1960s? What was the relationship between the SCLC and the FBI? What was the role of Dr. King?

Required reading selections:

Part I:
Introduction, 17-24
Farmer, 27-34
Nixon, 37-39
Parks and Nixon, 40-51
Martin, 58-61
Lowery, Lewis, McCain, 66-82
Bond, Curry, 101-108
Farmer, Thomas, Lewis, Farmer, 109-29
Hurley, 131-37
Gardiner, Marrisett, 139-45
Shuttlesworth, 154-61
Allen & Evans, Morgan, McNair, 167-85
Turner, Bolden, Turner, 187-96
Lewis, Bolden, Webb, Lewis, 206-12
Memories of the March, 216-21
Guyot, Cobb, Hamer, 238-55
Dennis, 273-78

Part II:
Patterson, 297-303
Shelton, 316-20
Foster, 325-27
Shores, 348-51
Pritchett, 361-66
Hefferman, 373-376
Sutton, 378-81
Benton, 385-86
Sims, 416-23
Young, 425-31
Cotton, 432-34
Bolden, 451-52
Hall, 453-54
Johnson, 455-57
Abernathy, 463-72

Essay Instructions: ALL SOURCES MUST BE PRIMARY!! NO INTERNET SOURCES!! If in doubt please e-mail me with questions.

The Assignment: your task is to write a 7-9 page research paper in which you choose a topic and construct an analysis using primary sources. The assignment is designed to push you intellectually. It is not intended to be easy, but we hope the assignment is rewarding. The intention is to improve your research and writing abilities and to deepen your understanding of history and what historians do when they write about the past. You will work closely with your Teaching Assistant in choosing your topic and in finding the appropriate sources for your essay. The OU library has readily available collections on hundreds of topics. A check of the AMicroform Research Materials@ (noted below, #2) yields all sorts of possibilities: a sampling revealed collections exploring the history of the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI file on Malcolm X, the internment of the Japanese during World War II, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Manhattan [atomic bomb] Project, the National Women=s Party, the National Security Council, blacks in the New Deal, oil and the energy crisis, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Women=s Bureau, the Dakota Superintendency of Indian Affairs, and Aunderground@ newspapers from the 1960s and 1970s. Some of you might choose a topic closer to Oklahoma and use the campus newspaper and old yearbooks to investigate campus life at OU in the 1940s or why OU football plays such a dominant role in the state=s self-image. In most cases, your sources will be found in Bizzell Library. Some documents may be printed on paper; others will be on microfiche or microfilm. We will discourage you from using sources available on the web, and you must receive permission from your Teaching Assistant before doing so. Many of you may want to use the New York Times as your key source, in part because it is considered the nation=s Apaper of record,@ in part because it has a superb index. For those of you interested in Oklahoma history, the library now has a digitized, searchable, full-text version of the Daily Oklahoman dating from 1901. You can access this index from the OU Libraries homepage using LORA. Another common reference work is The Readers= Guide to Periodical Literature that allows you to find articles relevant to your topic in a large number of magazines and journals.

Paper guidelines: The paper should be well-written, closely argued, and tightly organized. It should avoid jargon, it should be lucid, and it should be free of grammatical and typographical errors. Please type and double space your paper and use a 12 point ATimes New Roman@ font. Allow one inch margins all around, except on the first page which should have your name in the upper right hand corner, then a two inch drop to the title of your essay, then a double space to the beginning of the text. Indent all paragraphs five spaces, but do not quadruple space between paragraphs. You do not need a title page replete with fancy graphics nor a dedication to AMom and Dad Who Always Stood By Me@ nor a blank page after the title page to make your essay look thicker. Use a staple in the upper left hand corner to bind your pages together rather than either a plastic folder or an easy-to-lose paper clip. Number the pages of your essay, and make sure the pages are collated properly.

Citing Sources: Learning how to cite sources properly is one of the key components of this assignment. We want you to use endnotes rather than footnotes, and your citation form should adhere to ATurabian,@ a shorter version of the Chicago Manual of Style.
Your essay should have all the hallmarks of the classic essay form: that is, it should have an introduction that catches the reader=s attention and introduces the argument, a body that substantiates the thesis laid out in the introduction, and a conclusion that lets the reader know the significance of the findings.

Essay Instructions: Guidelines for Paper
Historical Analysis of the Civil Rights Movement

Sources for this paper:
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (required text)
1** Harvard Sitkoff, “The Preconditions for Racial Change”
2** David J. Garrow, “A Leader for His Time: Martin Luther King, Jr.” (an excerpt from Garrow’s 1988 book Bearing the 3** Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference)

THE ESSAY SHOULG ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION:
The Essay Question: Historians, including Harvard Sitkoff and David Garrow, frequently suggest that the Civil Right Movement was driven forward by national leaders and organizations, who in turn mobilized individuals at the grass roots level. They also look to broad national and international trends to help explain the movement’s successes. Anne Moody’s autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, offers a different kind of analysis from that presented by Sitkoff and Garrow. In a well-written, clearly argued essay, please discuss how Moody’s personal history supports, alters and/or challenges this traditional narrative of the Civil Rights Movement.
You will want to consider how Moody’s personal experiences shaped the ways in which she understood and participated in the formal Civil Rights Movement. You should also explicitly (though succinctly) address the assumptions and arguments of Sitkoff and Garrow. (Try to bring the three pieces into dialogue with each other by integrating Sitkoff and Garrow’s arguments throughout the paper rather than simply addressing them up front and moving on.) Some questions to consider: What were the most important events, ideas, or experiences that shaped Moody’s “coming of age”? Why were these events especially important? What did Moody learn from them? How did she come to understand the social significance of gender, race, and class? How did these understandings inform her participation in the Civil Rights Movement? What was Moody’s relationship to national organizations like the NAACP and SNCC and how did she react to leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.? How and why did her personal experiences lead to her wonder by the end of the book if “we shall overcome”?
Your essay should be structured around a clear argument, not some vague statement that “personal experiences were important to Moody.” Rather, you should argue which experiences or what kind of experiences were important to her “coming of age,” show how and why they were important, and discuss how her autobiography complicates and/or reasserts traditional narratives of the Civil Rights Movement.

Instructions:
Paper should be 5-7 pages, double-spaced, and typed in 12-point font. Do not alter your margins, spacing or font size: we can tell and it’s annoying!
This paper should properly acknowledge words and ideas that are not your own. Please give citations using Chicago Style. I have posted a quick guide to using this form of citation on the class blackboard site under “Assignments.” Since the Sitkoff and Garrow essays I’ve posted were both reprinted in a sourcebook??"and since the page numbers refer to that reprinted version??"you should cite the essays using the format for a chapter in a book. The book in which these essays appeared is: Major Problems in American History, Vol. II: Since 1865, eds. Elizabeth Cobs Hoffman and Jon Gjerde (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2002).


There are faxes for this order.