Local Incidents & National Debates in the Civil Rights Movement—A Panel Discussion

MHS Event

This seminar will workshop a work in progress. 
The event is hybrid and free of charge. An in-person reception will begin at 4:30 PM. 

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This panel will highlight various debates over Civil Rights in the 1960s United States.  Derek Catsam’s paper considers a televised address delivered by President John F. Kennedy on June 11, 1963 and nationally recognized issues in the Civil Rights struggle. Kennedy had largely fallen short on issues of racial justice. But in this relatively brief speech Kennedy would place himself firmly behind civil rights and his words would lead to the passage of the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the nation’s history. In just over a year Lyndon Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A year after that he would invoke one of the great spirituals of the struggle by declaring, upon signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, “We shall overcome.” But in many ways the roots of that triumph, as much as Johnson did to ensure that the act passed, and the credit for its emergence, belongs with John Kennedy, who had disappointed so many on civil rights but seemed to be coming around on it as the great domestic moral challenge of his times. Dylan O’Hara’s essay focuses on a local struggle. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, the Boston Black United Front announced its intention to separate Black neighborhoods from the rest of Boston, Massachusetts into an independent entity. This paper explores the social, political, and intellectual demands of Black separatists in Boston to expand regional understandings of Black radicalism in 20th century New England, highlight the unique contributions of Boston's separatists to the doctrine, and explore the little known organizers and clubs that challenged Boston's racial geography. 

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