The U.S. Civil Rights Movement

“The U.S. Civil Rights Movement”

Wednesday, April 2, 9, 16, 2025

5:00 pm PST/ 8:00 pm EST

Lecture One: Groundwork: The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. April 2

Lecture Two: The Arc of Justice: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mass Mobilizing April 9

Lecture Three: “What do we want?!” From Civil Rights Protests to Black Power Politics, April 16

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s transformed America. It ended legalized racial segregation, extended the franchise to Black southerners, and created unprecedented job, business, and housing opportunities for Black northerners. But it also left a great deal undone. This course explains the origin, evolution, and outcomes of the Civil Rights Movement. In approach, it looks at the movement from the bottom-up and the inside-out, aiming to make clear how everyday Black people made America a fairer and more just - if still imperfect - society.

About Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries

Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries teaches, researches, and writes about the African American experience from a historical perspective.

He has chronicled the civil rights movement in the ten-episode Audible Originals series “Great Figures of the Civil Rights Movement,” and has told the remarkable story of the original Black Panther Party in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, which has been praised as “the book historians of the black freedom movement have been waiting for.”

Dr. Jeffries has collaborated on several public history projects, including serving as the lead scholar and primary scriptwriter for the $27 million renovation and redesign of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, the site of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Jeffries regularly shares his expertise on African American history and contemporary Black politics through public lectures, op-eds, and interviews with print, radio, and television news outlets, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN, and MSNBC.

He has also contributed to several documentary film projects as a featured on-camera scholar, including the Emmy nominated PBS documentary Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise.

Dr. Jeffries' commitment to teaching “Hard History” led him to edit Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, a collection of essays by leading civil rights scholars and teachers that explores how to teach civil rights history accurately and effectively, and to host the podcast “Teaching Hard History,” a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Learning for Justice division. Hasan also helps school districts develop anti-racism programming and culturally responsive curricular content centered on social studies by conducting professional development workshops for teachers and administrators.

An associate professor in the Department of History at The Ohio State University, Dr. Jeffries takes great pride in opening students’ minds to new ways of understanding the past and the present. For his pedagogical creativity and effectiveness, he has received numerous awards, including Ohio State’s highest commendation for teaching – the Ohio State Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Dr. Jeffries graduated from Morehouse College in 1994 with a BA in history, and earned his PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history from Duke University in 2002.

Host or Publisher Common Power