Videos

Anthony Barthelemy on Jim Crow legislation
Civil Rights Movement: 2002

Anthony Barthelemy, Associate Professor of English, defines the concept of phenotype to describe the racist, segregated, "Jim Crow" South. He grew up in that South and remembers July 2, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, a bill that opened all public accommodations -- hotels, restaurants, swimming pools -- to all Americans regardless of race, color, religion or national origin. The Jim Crow signs could no longer be enforced, although Barthelemy explains that racism continued to harass blacks. He describes the plight of African Americans seeking medical attention; they had to hope that a white doctor would be willing to see them. Barthelemy adds that African Americans who wanted to buy clothes were not allowed to try them on first. "'Couldn't' was the word that we lived by."
Time: 7 min 22 sec

David A. Lieberman on growing up in the South
Civil Rights Movement: 2002

David Lieberman, UM Senior V.P. for Business and Finance, explains that, having been 30 with a wife and three children in 1965, he "missed out on this decade of drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll," provoking a laugh from the audience. Lieberman mentions that he attended segregated schools and that "I was at Chapel Hill; Michael Jordan couldn't have happened in the Fifties when I was in college. He was from my home town, Wilmington." He recounts his own academic career and his observations of social change in the 1950s and 1960s, getting another laugh when he mentions that for many years he was working "for a firm nobody ever heard of until a year ago: Arthur Andersen." He traveled throughout the South for the Andersen company. Lieberman's father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who became a merchant in Wilmington and employed blacks to serve both white and black customers, which was against social custom. He quotes from the book "The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South," by Eli N. Evans.
Time: 6 min 32 sec

James Wyche on discrimination in 1960s Baltimore
Civil Rights Movement: 2002

University of Miami Vice Provost and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences James Howard Wyche recalls growing up and working in the fields in the 1950s and resenting the treatment of minorities in migrant labor camps. He describes first coming to Baltimore in the mid-1960s and looking for a home, only to discover discrimination against blacks in housing. He contacted the local chapter of the Black Panthers and persuaded them to talk with the mayor of Baltimore, Nicholas "Tommy" D'Alesandro, about improving conditions for African Americans. With a graduate student group, Wyche canvassed the Johns Hopkins neighborhood and collected food, money, and clothing for the black community of eastern Baltimore. He discusses campus protests at Johns Hopkins. He also remembers being present when a friend in the Black Panther Party was framed and unjustly arrested.
Time: 13 min 10 sec

Jomills H. Braddock on social movements in the 1960s
Civil Rights Movement: 2002

Jomills Henry Braddock, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Research on Sport in Society, discusses social movements in the 1960s. He recalls attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and feeling excitement about student agitation. He adds that student protesters could be silenced if college administrators telephoned their parents and warned that their behavior could endanger their college attendance. African American college students wished to achieve greater diversity on campus, from recruitment of more black professors to the availability of black hair care products in the campus store. Braddock reveals that his fourteen-year-old sister-in-law was one of the girls killed in the Birmingham Ku Klux Klan bombing of an African American Baptist church in 1963. He says that such experiences caused him to devote his life to working for social change.
Time: 9 min 38 sec

Mark Naison on race relations in America
Civil Rights Movement: 2002

Guest speaker Dr. Mark D. Naison is a professor of African-American studies and history at Fordham University in the Bronx, and author of "White Boy: A Memoir" (2002; his autobiography about race relations in Brooklyn). An energetic lecturer, he talks about his book, about growing up in Brooklyn, and how he became an activist. "I didn’t choose activism; history tapped me on the shoulder." Naison explains that the diaspora of African Americans from the South into northern cities resulted in multi-ethnic neighborhoods of all kinds. For the first time, white kids and black kids were growing up together and playing sports together at school; also, rhythm-and-blues and other forms of African American music were being marketed to young urban whites. He addresses his student audience as a group of young people who are facing the war with Iraq and an economy more depressed than that of the 1960s and encourages them to think about what makes people decide to take politics and history seriously. Naison says that when he heard Martin Luther King’s "I have a dream" speech, he joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He talks about how male college students were alarmed about the Vietnam War because student deferments were being eliminated by 1967. NOTE: Naison says at the beginning that he will talk about Black Power movements, but because of edits in the video, this is not covered, while his discussion of Vietnam appears twice.
Time: 18 min 22 sec

Marvin P. Dawkins on campus civil rights movements
Civil Rights Movement: 2002

University of Miami Professor of Sociology Marvin P. Dawkins speaks about the students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, N.C., who staged a protest at a Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960 and thereby ignited the civil rights movement in the United States. A few months later, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee gathered at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. African American college administrators felt they had to contain student activism at historically black colleges. Dawkins lists some of the issues that student protesters were concerned with and discusses race riots.
Time: 9 min

Steven M. Green on direct action resistance
Civil Rights Movement: 2002

University of Miami Professor of Biology Steven M. Green talks about his experiences in the 1960s during which he engaged in protest movements and, as a result, was sentenced to imprisonment and hard labor. He explains his life experiences that led him to champion social integration and nondiscrimination and notes that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was considered "the talking organization," whereas the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was "the doing organization." Green was a member of CORE and he participated in protests against the Bank of America, which had discriminatory hiring and employment policies. He also volunteered to visit Mississippi in 1965 and went door to door to encourage blacks to vote.
Time: 12 min 18 sec