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 children at last . . .
Hope is a song in a weary throat.
Pauli Murray from “Dark Testament” (1970)

If I were to ask you to tell me what you know about the Civil Rights Movement, what would you say? Would you mention Martin Luther King, Jr? Would you mention King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963? Would you mention Rosa Parks? My assumption is that you would mention at least one of these things. However, who or what else would you mention?

Would you mention Odell Waller? Would you mention Emmett Till? Would you mention the the professor and students from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, who got attacked for staging a sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter? One of the students at that sit-in was Anne Moody, and in 1968 she published her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi where she details growing up in rural Mississippi, her education, and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement as she experienced racism, sexism, and more.

Moody was not the only person to write a memoir about growing up in the Jim Crow South and their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Almost twenty years before Moody’s memoir, Lillian Smith detailed the impact of Jim Crow on herself as a white southerner. In her “Foreward” to the 1961 reissue of her memoir Killers of The Dream, Lillian E. Smith writes, “I realize this is a personal memoir, in one sense; in another sense, it is Every Southerner’s memoir.” At its core, memoir is an autobiographical genre. However, unlike autobiographies, memoirs focus on specific events, periods, or themes whereas an autobiography encompasses a much larger scope.

In this course, we will read various memoirs written by women about the Civil Rights Movement. We will expand our understanding of the movement, looking beyond the boundaries of 1954–1968 to think about the movement in a broader context. We will read memoirs from Southern women in Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina who came of age during the Jim Crow era and lived during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

During this course, I want you to think about the overarching themes and connections between these individual’s memoirs. I want you to think about how their memoirs help you to expand your understanding of history, specifically the ways we think about the Civil Rights Movement, and the present. I want you to think about how the memoirists speak to you personally, in whatever form that may be. The purpose of writing and literature is to communicate, to reach out of the page. That is what we will experience in this class as we read and write over the course of the semester.

Primary Texts:

• Davis, Angela. An Autobiography. (Selections)
• Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. (Selections)
• Murray, Pauli. Song in a Weary Throat.
• Smith, Lillian. Killers of the Dream.
• Weaver, Lilia Quintero. Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White.

Course Requirements

• Assignments
• Conferences
• Essay #1
• Essay #2
• Final Paper
• Expanding the Civil Rights Movement

Late Essay Policy:

You have one week after the due date to turn your essay into me. However, you will not receive any comments or marks on the paper. Instead, you will just receive a grade after I read it. Essays will not be accepted more than a week after the due date.

Attendance and In-Class Participation — Although I believe that as adults you should have control over your own education, attendance is vital to your success in this course. Much of your learning and work will take place in class, and you will be involved in discussing the readings in class. To fully comprehend and hopefully appreciate the texts, you should come to class fully prepared. This means you should have read the homework and completed any assignments for class.

You will be held accountable to the following attendance policy: 4 or more unexcused absences will result in a grade of FA (failure due to absences). If you have an excused absence — e.g., university-sponsored trip, doctor’s visit — you must provide verification to the course instructor, in writing, no later than one week after the absence occurs. Tardiness is disruptive and disrespectful to your peers and to the teacher. Every two instances of tardiness (defined as 5 minutes late or more) will be counted as one absence.

Daily attendance is not sufficient to guarantee you a passing participation grade. Any activities taking place during class time contribute to your in-class participation grade. This includes note-taking during lectures, actively participating during discussion, and otherwise participating in class activities.

Assignments — Throughout the semester, we will have both in-class and online assignments. These will include posting topics online, answering questions, or other such activities. There will be small group discussions during classes and other activities that will be part of this grade

Conferences — We will have conferences for each paper. These will be mandatory because they allow us to discuss your essays in a smaller setting, giving us more time to work through your questions.

Essays — The essays will each be between 750–1000 words. They will highlight your engagement with the course material through your use of argument, sources, and critical thinking. For each, you must have a succinct argument and support the argument with examples from both primary and secondary texts.

Final Paper — The final paper will be an extension of the essays and will be 1,500–2,000 words. You will be required to engage with the course material and present a succinct argument with examples from the text(s) and scholarly sources to support your argument.

Expanding the Civil Rights Movement — For this assignment, you will choose an event or individual that we have/will discuss over the course of the semester. You will use resources such as the Civil Rights Movement Archive, the Lillian E. Smith Papers, or another source to find more information. Once you acquire the information, you will write a short reflection narrative (750–1000 words) placing the event or individual within a larger context of the texts we read during the course. You will also present your findings during the finals period on May 7.