Department of History, The University of British Columbia, 2017-18, Term II
H335
from slavery to citizenship, ‘Jim Crow’ apartheid to civil rights – & beyond:
african-american history, 1850-2018
Prof. Paul Krause
Office Phone: 604.822.5168; e-mail: krause at mail dot ubc dot ca
Home Page: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/pkrause/index.html
Lectures (With Discussions): Tues., Math 104; Thurs., Buchanan D201
11:00-12:30
Office Hours: Thurs., 2:00-3:00 pm, 1122 Buchanan Tower

INTRODUCTION

This course interrogates the history of Americans of African ancestry from the decade before the U.S. Civil War through 2018. A central focus of the course is the 19th Century and the problems of emancipation and Reconstruction, the period immediately after the war. We concentrate on the 19th Century because three of the most important questions in African-American History, in U.S. History, in Western History, and indeed in World History – the meanings of freedom, of democracy, and of race – come into sharp focus in this period. The definitions that various groups gave or tried to give to these ideas and to practices of them in the 19th Century continue to shape our world in the 21st, as unfolding political processes and events in, and beyond, the U.S. remind us daily.

The other topics that we will consider in H335 are related to the big issues of freedom, democracy, and race and to various struggles and battles to define them. Among these other topics: the emergence of the American system of apartheid in the era of “Jim Crow;” the Harlem Renaissance; the Civil Rights Movement; and the contemporary economic and political status of Americans of African ancestry.

The readings, drawn from primary and secondary works in history and the social sciences, as well as from the American literary canon, focus on groups as well as on representative men and women – some famous, but many who lived at a distance from the centre stage of history. By examining the lives of selected individuals and groups, this course asks you to explore the meaning of freedom, democracy, and race in the United States, and, in particular, to investigate the relationship of freedom and democracy to the question of race and the problem of racism. As the readings, lectures, and video presentations will suggest, the inextricably linked question of gender also will be explored carefully – even when some texts may seem oblivious to it.

Above all, perhaps, this course asks that you think about the past as a set of problems and questions, and not merely as a simple narrative of events, and that you extend yourselves beyond an engagement with various aspects of the history of African Americans to consider how such history “works” in the present. Accordingly, we will be investigating how parts of the past seem to have been silenced, and how we might come to “unsilence” them.

We will need to work on unsilencing ourselves, and our lectures and discussions are intended to help in the effort.

Some of the highlights of this syllabus include:

1.)  The opening module of the course on contemporary issues addresses the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Jr., Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Oscar Grant (whose death is interrogated by the film, “Fruitvale Station”), John Crawford III, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile – among other men of color who have been killed in the recent past. At the beginning of the term, we will read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s meditation on racialized killing and violence, Between The World and Me, and study the PBS documentary by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Two Nations of Black America.” This film frames the course, and we will revisit it in the spring. The film points to the large issue of racially-inflected wealth inequity that stands at the centre of contemporary American life.

2.)  We will be reading three compelling novels – Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright’s Black Boy/American Hunger, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved – and also studying Charles Burnett’s masterful film, “Killer of Sheep.” Over and above the vexing problems of pain and humor, memory, and inequity that these works explore, they also raise questions about the relationship between history, both as a discipline and as lived experience, and literature and cinema. These questions will be explicitly addressed at the end of the course in the work of the literary and film critic, Benjamin DeMott.

3.)  Additionally, H335 has been built around a number of award-winning documentaries, including “Reconstruction: The Second Civil War,” and several episodes from “Eyes on the Prize,” which stands as the best visual history of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s – often referred to as “The Second Reconstruction.” Additionally, we will study a compelling one-person performance by Cleavon Little, the star of “Blazing Saddles, in a theatrical memoir of sharecropping in Alabama, “All God’s Dangers.”

READINGS

There is no textbook for H335, but Darlene Clark Hine et al, African Americans: A Concise History, or other surveys, may prove helpful. They are readily available from used booksellers, and I have multiple editions that you are free to borrow.

In addition to the course pack, which is on sale at the UBC Bookstore, the required texts are:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World And Me

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation & Reconstruction

Richard Wright, Black Boy/American Hunger (part one only; part two is optional)

Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality (revised edition)

Toni Morrison, Beloved

The course pack contains the following selections:

1. Benjamin DeMott, "Put on a Happy Face: Masking the differences between blacks and whites," Harper's Magazine, September 1995.

2. Richard Hofstadter, “Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth,” selection from The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948).

3. Roger B. Taney, “Obiter Dictum,” Scott v. Sandford (1857).

4. Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder & Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting” (2002).

5. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1997), selections.

6. Alan Brinkley et al, “Reconstructing the Nation,” selection from American History: A Survey (1991).

7. Eric Foner, “The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation” (1994).

8. An Outline in Maps – African-American History from the Civil War through the 1920s.

9. Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” (1892).

10. Charles Payne, “Men Led, But Women Organized: Movement Participation of Women in the Mississippi Delta” (1990), and “Ella Baker and Models of Social Change” (1989).

WHAT ARE THE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF H335?

Students who complete this course successfully will possess an understanding of the broad outlines of African-American History from the 1850s to the present day. By the end of the term, students should be able to:

Explain the origins of the U.S. Civil War.

Appraise the root causes and the immediate effects of the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Discuss and analyze the successes and failures of Reconstruction and their contemporary significance.

Compare four magisterial works in imaginative American and African-American literature and cinema, Black Boy/American Hunger, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Beloved, and “Killer of Sheep,” and discuss in an informed way the general relationship linking fiction and history.

Discuss the origins, workings, and dismantling of American apartheid.

Explain the origins of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the key role played in it by women, and assess the movement’s lasting impact.

Offer an argument about why, in 2018, racial inequities remain a part of U.S. society.

Analyze, in general terms, how master historical narratives come to be created and, with particular reference to African-American History, how they are created and sometimes challenged.

Assess the possibility of studying history – any history and African-American History, in particular – without engaging and deploying gender as a category of analysis.

GENERAL EXPECTATIONS AND GUIDELINES FOR H335

Your success will depend mostly upon careful reading and note-taking, a willingness to take intellectual risks, and a desire to explore what the novelist and critic Ralph Ellison once labeled the “tradition of forgetfulness…, of denying the past, of converting the tragic realities of ourselves but most often of others, even if those others are of our own group, into comedy.”

Participation in our lecture/discussions is an essential part of your success. What does participation mean? It means active engagement with your colleagues; it means asking questions and listening carefully to others; it means trying to answer questions and having the courage to share your ideas; it means coming to class prepared – that is, coming to class with having completed the reading.

On some days, our discussions will be brief; on other days, we will collectively dig more expansively into the materials we are studying. If you are shy or predisposed to maintain silence in a group, you will not be penalized; just drop by my office to let me know that you find public speaking to be difficult. No questions will be asked, and perhaps we can find a means of awarding bonus points for you. All those who find a way to speak in public are eligible for a maximum of 10 bonus points/marks, but bear in mind that such points/marks will be awarded based on the quality, and not the quantity, of your contributions, and especially on how well you can respond with integrity, courage, and empathy to your colleagues – particularly when you may disagree with them.

Each of us shares the responsibility for how well H335 will work. Accordingly, we need to build an environment where everyone feels welcome, where all our ideas are respected, and where they can be explored and criticized. This means above all that it is our shared responsibility to ensure that everyone in the class is comfortable in it, and that no one feel ill-at-ease for reasons of age or gender, economic standing, political preference, race, ethnic or religious background, national origin, or sexual orientation. It therefore follows that jokes at anyone’s expense other than that of the instructor are not permitted. You can always make fun of me, as I am a willing and easy target, but please refrain from making fun of your colleagues. What may seem like a harmless joke to you may not be a joke to someone else, and the results of the unintended but nonetheless real hurt and pain of an alleged joke are almost always impossible to obliterate.

Lamentably, the issues of workplace safety and of sexual assault and predation continue to be of frightening importance. They require all of us adhere to codes of behavior – in and out of the classroom and wherever we encounter each other – that respect the emotional and physical integrity of all our colleagues, and the well-known, established behavioral boundaries which, as we are reminded on a daily basis, continue to be breached – as they have been at UBC and indeed in the Department of History itself. My expectation is that all will abide by the guidelines for appropriate behavior outlined by UBC, as well as by these more directly stated standards.

I have some understanding of how to negotiate the bureaucracies at UBC; should you have need of assistance regarding the problem of predation and assault, I stand ready to direct you to empathic, wise persons on campus who can provide professional support. In this, I can assure you of utter confidentiality.

UBC has a policy on the matter of respectful environments for students, faculty, and staff. It is available here: http://www.hr.ubc.ca/respectful-environment/. And you may find some of UBC’s recent updates on the issue of sexual assault and workplace safety here: http://www.ubc.ca/staysafe/. The university has stated that it is in the process of revising its policies on sexual assault. Check out the updates here: http://equity.ubc.ca/. Additional links to recent problems at UBC may be found at this page on my web site: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/pkrause/page22.html.

No one likes to deal with marks, but they are a fact of our university lives. In H335, you will be rewarded for consistently doing your work, and there may be chances to resubmit work with which you may be dissatisfied.

Work that receives an “A” is inspired: it demonstrates a thorough grasp of the material and an original understanding of it. Work that receives a “B” means that it constitutes a strong performance and demonstrates a good understanding of the material. Note that a “C” in this class means that you have done pretty well and that you have attained an adequate comprehension of the material we cover. In order to get this mark, you must do all of the work and complete all of the reading. Work that receives a “D” is inadequate, usually because it contains serious gaps and misunderstandings. An “F” will be awarded if your work is completely inadequate, that is, if it reveals that you have no real understanding of the material we have covered.

Remember that marks are an evaluation of your work, and not a comment on your intelligence.

If you experience difficulties with the readings, please come see me. We can discuss the troublesome material or, if you like, some general strategies for doing the work in H335. Drop by early in the term. I always am happy to meet with students. Really.

If you face a learning challenge, such as a diagnosed learning disability, please know that I stand ready to work with you so that you can achieve to the fullest extent of your aspirations. Drop by to discuss the course requirements and whatever accommodations may be helpful to you. If you have fears about speaking in public, please let me know so that we can work out an appropriate, helpful, and non-threatening strategy for equitable evaluation. If you do approach public speech with trepidation – and if you do not – try to assume that you are among friends in H335. My experience suggests that the more of us who proceed from this assumption, the more likely it is to become a demonstrable fact of our shared classroom experience.