Women In the Civil Rights Movement Memoir Syllabus

Over the past few years, I have thought about various iterations of a Civil Rights memoir course. One example of this is the “Civil Rights Memoir” syllabus I posted about a year ago. Each of these syllabi seek to move students beyond thinking about the movement merely in relation to the “nine-word problem.” As I thought about this course more, I decided to focus it on memoirs written by women who participated in the movement or grew up during the movement. As well, I wanted to expand the narrative, providing memoirs from 1949 through the present. This formulation will, hopefully, call upon students to look at the movement not through a set of constricted dates but as a progression, one with legacy and a continuation into the present. By focusing on women, I want students to see, again, beyond the constructed narrative that foregrounds male figures. There are so many women I could have added, but for this course I only chose five: Lillian Smith, Pauli Murray, Anne Moody, Angela Davis, and Lila Quintero Weaver.

Course Description and Objectives:

Hope is a crushed stalk
Between clenched fingers
Hope is a bird’s wing
Broken by a stone.
Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —
A word whispered with the wind,
A dream of forty acres and a mule,
A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,
A name and place for one’s children
And children’s…