Content Objectives
The AP English Language focuses on the rhetorical choices writers and speakers make to most effectively communicate their purpose to their audiences. When choosing readings and assignments for the class, I need to evaluate how well those readings “engage students in becoming skilled readers of prose written in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts, and in becoming skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes” (College Board). This unit must also satisfy the East Side Union High School District mandate that all East Side schools implement Common Core standards. The CCSS requirement addressed by this unit requires that students “[c]onduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation” (CCSS ELA Literacy W.11-12.7-12.8). This is a critical skill students will need to have mastered prior to entering college. Currently, most of my students lack this skill. My hope is that this unit will help bridge that gap between the skills that make them successful in high school and the skills they will need to be successful in college.
To accomplish this goal, the unit will briefly survey American protest movements but will use as its main vehicle the Civil Rights Movement, its history (from the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) and its influence on later movements. This quick study will enable students to see parallels with current movements and to identify the similarities and differences they have with the Civil Rights Movement.
Like many young people, my students are full of opinions on so many topics, but those opinions tend to be based solely on their personal experiences or observations. Some of this may be attributed to their age--after all, very few 15- or 16-year-olds have a vast store of experiences. But this is not unusual nor relegated to the young. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, in his work Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy that in part examined theories of democracies, looked at the ways in which people arrive at decisions and the factors that inform their opinions, and posited that those decisions and opinions are most influenced by a sphere of experience and relationships with which one has a direct relation.2 This is certainly borne out by my own experience in the classroom. And though not inherently positive or negative, what troubles me is this narrow perspective coupled with a growing disdain for any opinions that differ from their own. Part of the problem is that we surround ourselves with like-minded individuals, those with whom we share opinions, views, perspectives, beliefs--factions, as James Madison aptly defined it (Federalist 10).3 So when we are confronted with or by others with whom we do not share common values, we are shocked, even defensive. We do not see the irony of “poo-pooing” others’ thoughts as ill- or uninformed when they differ from our own. We ascribe a discriminatory intent or belief based on nothing more than that the ideas and opinions are different from the ones we hold ourselves. But in our increasingly global society, students cannot afford to be so narrow-minded. It is paradoxical that we have a citizenry so ill-informed when so much information can be accessed so easily. Researching controversial movements and requiring they consider opposing viewpoints will help broaden their views.
I hope taking this approach will help students to see how the past informs the present and can inform the future. I also hope that in learning about the challenges activists face in their struggle for equality and recognition of their value as humans and citizens, students see that progress toward a more inclusive society takes time and fortitude, patience and perseverance, that to achieve the American Dream and its promise of justice requires a citizenry awake and willing to work toward that more perfect union. Students will learn that though they may not be old enough to vote, they are not powerless. Like generations before them, they are living in a time of great flux, players in a drama of times whose final scenes are not yet written. Will they take action that effectuates change, or will they let change happen to them? Will they choose activism, or will they choose complacency? Finally, they will learn that role they choose, the future is theirs. They must be prepared to act to ensure it is a future they want to live in.
The goal of my unit is for my students to learn those lessons and to be able to conduct academic research and write a five to seven-page paper supported by reliable sources. They will choose, with my guidance, a current social justice movement to conduct research on in small groups. In order to do this, I will provide a framework from which they will may identify and evaluate their chosen movement (see below). Their final project will be to produce a well-documented, well-supported paper that delves into the origins of the movement and assesses its potential for success, using their research as a basis for their conclusions, and then present their findings to their classmates.
The essential questions below will help guide their research as they navigate this new terrain of inquiry and analysis.
- What is American democracy?
- Who decides membership in that democracy?
- What are our rights as members, and can those rights be taken away?
- When our rights are endangered, or when we see injustice occurring, what recourse do people have to protect those rights or stop or correct the injustice?
- Are social justice movements effective in securing the rights of marginalized communities, and if so, what makes them effective?
The Necessary Elements for a Successful Movement
Successful movements do not just happen. They take time, they take people, they take resources. They need goals, they need a message that activists can fight for and that supporters can feel good about, and they need an effective leader (or leaders) to not only inspire members of the movement, but to also
choose how and where to deploy resources; [to] enlist allies for the cause; and [to] shape the moral narrative that promote and nurture coalitions to achieve proximate goals that are hard to reverse. Leaders must be willing to take risks for causes larger than themselves, and they need to know how to move their supporters.4
This is what law professor Michael J. Graetz and political science professor Ian Shapiro argue in their soon-to-be-published book The Wolf at the Door: Fighting Economic Insecurity.5 In chapter 2, “Building Blocks of Distributive Politics,” Graetz and Shapiro argue that for campaigns to be successful, six factors must be present: 1) successful coalitions, 2) a moral narrative, 3) proximate goals that are 4) entrenched for the long term, 5) access to adequate resources, and 6) capable leadership.6 They begin laying the foundation for their argument by examining theories of how voters make decisions in capitalist democracies.
If we look at the building blocks posited by Graetz and Shapiro as necessary for, though no guarantor of, a successful movement, then it is much more clear how something like the Civil Rights Movement was able to accomplish the sweeping cultural and legal changes encompassed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ironically, the success of this movement for equality has later movements comparing themselves to it.7
Protest Movements: An American Tradition
Protest is no stranger to the American social and political landscape. In fact, Dawson Barrett argues in his book Defiant: Protest Movements in Post-Liberal America, that protest is an American tradition.8 Our Founding Fathers were not just scholars and elites; they were insurgents against a monarchical status quo, a group of Davids battling Goliath, seditionists in a protest movement that was the genesis of the American Revolution, leading to the founding of our country. This tradition of protest is enshrined in the first amendment of the Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances (emphasis added).9
This tradition of protest protected by the First Amendment is entrenched in the American psyche. Not only do we have the right to protest injustices we feel are being visited upon us, we have an historical obligation to take to the streets to make known our collective will and unhappiness.
To be sure, some social justice movements can claim success in changing policy, while others languish in the streets and in the halls of government. The history of African Americans’ fight for equality, from the abolitionist movement to the passages of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, provide ample material to examine how successful movements happen.
The Abolitionist Movement
Though there is some debate about when African slaves first arrived in the New World, conventional history—the one taught to students in their history classes—is that slavery arrived in 1619 with the first settlers of what was to become the Jamestown settlement on the shores of the future colony (and later state) of Virginia.
Though there is no date certain of when the first abolitionists arrived, it is clear that anti-slavery sentiment existed as early as the 18th century. In “To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement,” Christopher Cameron observes that “[w]hile most studies of the antislavery movement begin their examination in the 1820s,” Caesar Sarter, a free black man, published in 1774 an essay against slavery.10 But much of the history of the movement begins in the 1800s, and two of the most well-known abolitionists are Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Both men wrote and spoke out extensively and persuasively for abolishing slavery.
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland but escaped to the north and began his life’s work to end slavery. In addition to publishing three autobiographies,11 he was also a highly sought after speaker. In his speech “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” Douglass invoked the Declaration of Independence, “the rich inheritance of justice, liberty, and prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your father,” and juxtaposed these ideals with the reality for the slave:12
The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me [A]bove your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.13
This speech highlighted the stark differences between the lives of white audience with those of the black slaves.
Along with Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, a white abolitionist, spoke out strongly against slavery. Publisher of the Liberator and founder of the American Antislavery Society, Garrison used his voice to advocate for the abolishment of slavery.14 In an impassioned speech he delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle in New York on February 14, 1854, Garrison—like Douglass—invoked the Declaration of Independence as authority for his stance on slavery: He stated that his belief “in the self-evident truths,… ‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’”15 precluded him from supporting the institution of slavery.
He argued that to remain silent about the evils of slavery would make him a hypocrite. He further argued that it was against God’s law to allow the institution of continue to exist. He made this argument by pointing out the
…incongruity of giving [slaves] oral instruction, of teaching them the catechism, of reconciling them as suitably qualified to be members of Christian churches, of extending to them the ordinance of baptism, and admitting them to the communion table, and enumerating many of them as belonging to the household of faith16
with bondage a whole race of human beings. He could not reconcile enslavement of African-Americans with the ideal that “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."17
The persistence of both these men and of other abolitionists drew attention to the plight of slaves and shone a light on the “guilty inconsistency” of allowing the institution of slavery to exist.18
The Reconstruction Era and the Rise of Jim Crow
After the Civil War, Congress passed three key amendments to the Constitution to address African Americans’ status and legal rights. While this trio of amendments offered some protection to blacks, the narrow reading of their explicit language allowed their opponents to find ways to disenfranchise blacks, thus blunting their growing political influence and power. The narrow reading each amendment, beginning with of the thirteenth, required each subsequent amendment to patch the holes exploited by opponents to prevent former slaves from becoming full members of society.
On January 31, 1865 (three months before General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865), Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, then ratified it on December 6, 1865. In two relatively short sentences it 1) abolished slavery in the United States and 2) empowered Congress to “enforce [the prohibition] through appropriate legislation.”
Despite the relative simplicity of the text and its clear intent that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,”19 its authors did not anticipate the controversy that would arise out of its simple language, that while the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves from bondage and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, neither made the newly freed slaves U.S. citizens, thus precluding them from enjoying the rights and privileges of citizenship. Southern Democrats reasoned that the amendment “simply forbade the buying and selling of people and the expropriation of their labor.”20 They passed laws that effectively kept black Americans in a state of servitude, including conscripting the labor of children without requiring parental consent and barring blacks from owning land outside the boundaries of the cities in which they resided. Former slaves’ freedom was further curtailed when their employment options were restricted, keeping them from seeking gainful employment because they were denied “access…to non-agricultural vocations” and while potential employers were breaking the law if they tried to hire another employer’s workers. Former slaves were also victimized by “white vigilantes [who] declared open season” on them, “murdering and maiming them” with impunity.21 Republicans realized if laws and practices were allowed to continue, the Thirteenth Amendment would be ignored and the nation could become embroiled in another civil war.
It was not until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed three years later in 1868 that established “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States” were citizens of the U.S. as well as of the state in which they lived.22 The amendment further prohibited states from passing any law that would abridge or deprive citizens of the “privileges and immunities” attached to citizenship.23 But another interpretation arose. Nowhere in the amendment was franchise mentioned. Thus, opponents of full integration used the explicit language of the amendment to bar blacks from exercising the right reserved for white, male citizens: the right to vote. To remedy this oversight and over the objections of Southern Democrats and some Northern Republicans, 24 Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment on February 26, 1869, and ratified it on February 2, 18970, thus granting to African American males the right to vote.
With their freedom, citizenship, and franchise in place, blacks began to flex their political power. Not only did they play a key role voting Republican allies into state government, they entered into the political realm as office-holders themselves in the states that only five years before was fighting to keep them in bondage.
At times during Reconstruction, blacks comprised nearly half the lower-house delegates in Mississippi and Louisiana, and a majority in South Carolina. Sixteen southern blacks served in Congress, many held state executive offices, and a black justice sat on the South Carolina Supreme Court. Thousands of blacks held local office as sheriffs, magistrates, county councilors, and school board members.25
The era of Reconstruction provided significant gains for blacks in the post-Civil War South. As mentioned above, blacks enjoyed power through political office. Some states even prohibited race-based discrimination in public accommodations,26 allowed blacks to serve on juries, 27 and public education was now available to black children, with black schools receiving funding on par with white schools.28 But these gains were “precarious”29 and short-lived.
As the federal government withdrew troops from the South, Southern Democrats came back into power. With that power they began to roll back the hard-fought gains made by blacks.
[They] repealed public accommodations laws, formalized racial segregation in public schools, enacted measures constraining the mobility and bargaining power of black agricultural workers, and drastically reduced public spending on services such as education. They also adopted electoral devices—such as poll taxes, residency and registration requirements, and surrogate literacy tests—to suppress black voting and further reduce the strength of the Republican Party.30
The resurgence of Southern Democrats’ power quickly led to the erosion of the gains made during Reconstruction. One of the targets of Democrats was the Fifteenth Amendment which, Klarman wrote, “White southerners…generally regarded…as ‘the greatest crime of the nineteenth century.’”31 They acted swiftly to curtail this right without actually violating it. Instead, they
[u]sed fraud and violence to nullify black voting and seize political control for the Democratic Party. Democratic legislatures enacted complex voter registration and residency requirements that further reduced black voting and Republican representation. State constitutional conventions consummated black disfranchisement by adopting poll taxes and literacy tests.32
These insidious practices of legal segregation and the restrictive laws that prevented African Americans from exercising their rights would continue for decades before blacks and their allies began to organize and resist, using the courts and the power of protest to defeat Jim Crow.
The Civil Rights Movement
Though the fight for civil rights has been ongoing since the founding of our nation, for purposes of the curriculum unit, it is helpful to provide students specific dates around which they might frame their research.
In 1954, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Supreme Court in its landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education overturned its 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that racial segregation in public facilities was allowed so long as the facilities were equal. The unanimous Court found that separate was “inherently unequal.”33 Despite this ruling, de facto segregation continued because the Court “imposed no immediate remedy.”34 Not until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was there serious movements to desegregate the schools.
Another pivotal event had its genesis on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man and move to the back of the bus. Her refusal spurred the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted a year. According to Klarman, its significance was to
…demonstrate[] to demonstrate to the world that ordinary black southerners were fed up with the racial status quo and were prepared to fight it, even at the cost of extreme personal hardship. [It] also helped to convince individual blacks that through collective action they could transform social conditions.35
The boycott galvanized the black community and its allies, helping them to see the power of non-violent protest. The boycott did not end until December 20, a little over a month after the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional.
Other demonstrations followed, including lunch counter sit-ins and other protest venues where blacks and their white allies defied segregation laws:
…southern black youngsters, together with sympathetic whites, ‘sat in’ restaurants, lunch counters, and libraries; ‘stood in’ at movie theaters; ‘kneeled in’ at churches; and ‘waded in’ at beaches.36
Despite the violence they endured, protesters remained peaceful. The televised demonstrations showed virulence of racial animus, and helped garner sympathy for the movement, paving the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964. A little over a year later, he signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. Together, these two acts not only made sweeping changes to the legal status of African Americans and codified the intent of Fifteenth Amendment to guarantee to African Americans the right to franchise; it empowered the Attorney General to bring suit against states and other entities that discriminated on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin, effectively ended the era of Jim Crow.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ushered in a new era for activists and supporters who worked to abolish legal discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin. The purpose of the act was
[to] enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United states to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission of Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes.
The reach of the act was long. Title I prohibited states or those acting on behalf of the federal government from denying to any person who, based on state law, was eligible to vote from voting in a federal election. It also prohibited the use of literacy tests as a prerequisite for exercising one’s right to vote.37
Title II prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations. This meant that private-owned hotels, restaurants, or places of entertainment (including movie theaters, concert halls, and sports venues) that provided services to the public or whose business “operations…affect commerce” were barred from denying services to any patron based on race. The act enabled the federal government to exert jurisdiction over these private entities by invoking the federal government’s right to regulate interstate commerce.38 This expansive use of the federal government’s power, however, may have been ignored by the states if not for Sec. 204, which granted to the executive branch through the Attorney General the power to investigate complaints and bring suit in the United States District Court of the District of Columbia against any state it found to have violated the provisions of the act and to compel state compliance.
The act also made forced racial segregation in public schools, including institutions of higher learning, became illegal,39 and prohibited discrimination in employment, again vesting in the Attorney General the power to enforce state compliance.40
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
Hot on the heels of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While the Civil Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations, facilities, education, and voting in federal elections, the Voting Rights Act codified the 15th Amendment’s right to vote guarantee by barring states from denying the right to vote in state elections.
The act laid out its specific mission: “To enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes,”41 and went on to outlaw voting requirements put in place by states and local governments that may not have explicitly denied African Americans their right to vote but which amounted to de facto disenfranchisement. There are several notable provisions that dismantled these barriers to voting.
Section 2 tackled the race issue immediately, stating in no uncertain terms that
[n]o voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.42
The brevity of Sec. 2 and its placement in the act leaves no doubt that eliminating raced-based discrimination was paramount. The other sections of the act dealt with the specific ways in which states attempted to restrict or disenfranchise African Americans and reinforced the act’s overarching purpose, and in Sec. 3 endowed the U. S. Attorney General with the power to enforce the provisions of the act, including bringing actions in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia against jurisdictions which the Attorney General suspected of unlawfully denying otherwise eligible citizens the right to vote.43
In subsequent sections, the act prevented states from using any “test or device” to deny U.S. citizens the free exercise of their right to vote. The act defined “test or device” as
any requirement that a person as a prerequisite for voting or registration for voting (1) demonstrate the ability to read, write, understand, or interpret any matter, (2) demonstrate any educational achievement or his knowledge of any particular subject, (3) possess good moral character, or (4) prove his qualification by voucher of registered voters or members of any other class.44
In essence, the act prohibited states from using tests to measure literacy ability, subject matter competency, or moral character, or to predicate one’s right to vote on the testimonial of another, already registered voter.
Another barrier to franchise removed by the act was the poll tax. In Section 10, Congress found that requiring otherwise eligible voters to pay that tax as a “precondition to voting” would “(i) preclude[ ] persons of limited means from voting or impose[ ] unreasonable financial hardship upon such persons,” in essence preventing people from exercising their Constitutional right simply based on their inability to pay the tax. The act further reasoned that the poll tax had no “reasonable relation to any legitimate State interest” and, in fact, that “in some areas [had] the purpose or effect of denying persons the right to vote because of race or color.”45
Perhaps its most striking provision was not what it prohibited states from doing but rather what it required states to affirmatively do. Section 5 required that any state that ran afoul of the test set forth in Sec. 4(b)46 to petition the court before any changes to its voting laws could go into effect. Upon examination for the requested changes, the court had to determine that such a change did not amount a “qualification , prerequisite, standard, practice, or procedure” with the “purpose” or “effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.”47 Like the requirement set forth in the Civil Rights Act, states with a history of disenfranchising black voters were required to submit any proposed changes to its election laws to the Attorney General for review and approval.
Both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were victories in the fight for racial justice. These acts illustrate how the existence of the elements identified by Graetz and Shapiro were essential to these bills becoming law. [discussion]
In Their Own Words: Anne Moody and John Reynolds
As I observed above, very few of students have a natural fascination with history. To bring the history alive, students will read of the memoirs by activists in the civil rights movement as well Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody tells the story of her life as a civil rights activist. She begins her memoir with her childhood growing up in Mississippi during the time of lawful segregation. She details her early childhood years, being raised by her single mother after her father abandons the family. She is peripherally aware of the racial disparities both in the larger American society but also within the black community, especially when her mother falls in love with and has children with Raymond Davis, whose family looks down on Anne’s mother because of her darker skin color. But it is the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 that forces Anne to question the stark racial inequalities of American society. While in college, she joins the NAACP and actively participates in sit-ins and protests
John Reynold’s memoir The Fight for Freedom: A Memoir of My Years in the Civil Rights Movement is Reynold’s account of his work for civil rights. He joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the summer of 1965, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His memoir is most instructive in showing students that the fight for justice did not end with the passage of these two laws. The struggle to exercise their rights continued for years after. It shows students that the struggles continue to this day, especially important since Shelby County v. Holder (2013), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Section 4(b), the provision which contained the formula courts used to determine which jurisdictions had to get federal permission before any changes in its voting laws could take effect, which required states with a history of disenfranchising black voters, unconstitutional because the formula was over 40 years old.48
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is King’s eloquent response to a letter from white clergy men urging King and his followers to be patient, to desist from engaging in demonstrations, and pursue the changes sought through “proper channels” of negotiation.49 outlines the reasons that African Americans were fighting for their civil rights. In the letter, he lays out the reasons that their argument that the demonstrations are “unwise and untimely”50 fail. In essence, he argues that African Americans have waited long enough, “more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights,”51 that the injustice perpetrated on African Americans through unjust laws required immediate and sustained action.
The memoirs, coupled with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s letter, will help frame the movement in personal terms and showcase the role and power of individuals.
Current Protest Movements
Neither the Civil Rights Act nor the Voting Rights Act have eradicated discrimination based on race or the other protected classes. The courts are still adjudicating lawsuits brought by plaintiffs alleging unlawful discrimination. There are several modern-day protests movements students may research.
LGBTQ Rights
One of the modern-day movements today dealing with discrimination are issues surrounding the rights of transgender individuals, especially their right to serve in the military and the “bathroom laws” that prohibit transgender individuals from using the facility that corresponds to their gender identity.
Environmental Justice
Environmental justice has most recently been illustrated by the Standing Rock Sioux’s battle to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline from being built through reservation land and possibly endangering the drinking water of thousands of Native peoples across several states. The ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, where toxic levels of lead were found in the drinking water, is another issue that students may find interesting.52
Reproductive Rights
Legal battles over cultural values, fights that once seemed settled, have seen a resurgence on the national scene, most notably the fight over reproductive rights and the sustained battle of anti-abortion activists for a full repeal of the First Amendment protections of a woman’s right to choose.
Immigrants’ Rights
With a large student population of first- or second-generation immigrants, the issue of immigrants’ rights will likely be of great interest to my students. There are several avenues they may pursue, including the right to seek asylum in the U.S. and the feasibility of a pathway to citizenship for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and other undocumented residents.
Gun Control
Challenges to citizens’ Second Amendment right to bear arms gain traction with each new mass shooting. Though not a recent phenomena, police shootings of unarmed black men gained prominence in the public sphere when George Zimmerman, a Florida man, successfully used Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law as his defense when he was acquitted of shooting and killing 15-year-old Trayvon Martin. Another movement based on the issues surround gun control is the March for Our Lives movement, which arose out of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in Florida on February 14, 2018.
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
The first version of the Equal Rights Amendment was introduced by Alice Paul in 1923, then revised and reintroduced in 1972, but it failed to garner the necessary 38 states for ratification. Since 1983, the bill has been reintroduced every year, and currently 37 states have ratified the Amendment under its current language: Women shall have equal rights in the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”53
Occupy Wall Street
According to its website, Occupy Wall Street is “people-powered movement” founded to
fight[ ] back against the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations.54
The Occupy Movement as a cohesive social movement has all but disappeared. However, students can research the impact, if any, it has had on societal conversations surrounding economic and social inequalities.
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