Blacks and the Fight for Inclusion in the US
The Problem We All Live With (1964) was painted in response to the violent reaction to Ruby Bridges’s integration of her New Orleans elementary school in 1960.
New Kids in the Neighborhood, by Norman Rockwell, 1967
- pronote webquest
1) Remember American History with these mini-slides
(and Before Rosa Parks, there was Claudette Colvin)
Read: After Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: "Please let this sink in. It wasn't marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free."
2) The Black Lives Matter Movement
- 2013-2023: Trayvon Martin's shooting (watch the first 2 minutes)
Reactions to his shooting in 2012: "BBC World Have Your Say: Trayvon Martin"
- 10 years ago, there were clashes in Ferguson, Missouri, where police officer Darren Wilson shot 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9, 2014:
Photograph by Koran Addo
- 2020: George Floyd and the BLM movement: demonstrations and clashes started in Minneapolis and spread to other big cities in the US
III. What's happening with the US Police?
Police Brutality in the US: Why are they so heavily equipped?
Watch this episode of Last Week Tonight in which John Oliver explores the militarization of the police in the US (dates back to the 2014 protests after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Doesn't it have to do with its ancestral role of protecting the whites and their property?
Read Jamelle Bouie's Opinion in the NYT: “ The simplest answer to the question “Why don’t the American police forces act as if they are accountable to black Americans?” is that they were never intended to be. And to the extent that the police appear to be rejecting accountability outright, I think it reflects the extent to which the polity demanding it is now inclusive of those groups the police have historically been tasked to control. ”