Additional Assignments

  1. Using the Congressional Record, historic newspapers, and online sources, find four to five additional primary sources that inform your understanding of the history of school desegregation. At least two should be from the late 1960s or early 1970s and should enrich or be in conversation with the primary sources listed above; another two should be on the problem of school segregation in the United States today. Taken together, what do the sources tell you about how Americans at the time thought about the problem of school segregation, in both the North and South? How does their thinking at the time compare to how Americans think about, debate, or address the problem today?
  2. Choose the most interesting primary source that you found in your additional research and make a presentation to the class about how the source enriches or complicates an understanding of the history of school desegregation. The presentation should include a visual component. For example, if the primary source is text, present visually one or more key passages from the text that you will explicate for the class, identifying key words or phrases—or even better, present relevant images found from the web that help convey a central idea, question, or conflict that arises from a text source. Or you may choose to analyze an additional source that is itself an image.