Academic Bulletin Freshman Tutorials - 2011-12 - 11 FT 11

In their song “Get Up, Stand Up,” Bob Marley and the Wailers sing, “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time.  So now we see the light, we gonna stand up for our right.”  But what exactly are our rights?  And what does it mean to stand up for them?  “Civil Rights” refer to the rights of citizens, that is, the freedoms people are granted by their own governments.  Yet while many believe that civil rights are guaranteed by governments, history repeatedly tells stories of citizens who needed to assert these rights in order to enjoy them.  Our own country has frequently debated what types of freedoms civil rights encompass: the right to vote, the right to religious freedom, the right to speak freely, and what our own Declaration of Independence calls the God-given, “unalienable” rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

 

In this course, we will examine different moments in the history where citizens of several countries have engaged in a struggle for civil rights.  For example, we will begin with political documents that discuss the British revolution of 1688, the American Revolution that began in 1776, and the French Revolution that began in 1789.  We will then turn to films, speeches, music, and literature from the American Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s—spending most of the semester with authors such as James Baldwin, W.E.B. DuBois, Fannie Lou Hamer, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Wright, and Malcolm X.  Films and music in which artists have encouraged fellow citizens to “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” of freedom—such as The Long Walk Home and the ballads of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone—will also shape our discussions.   At the end of the course we will consider how current struggles for civil rights in our own countries and in the countries of Egypt and Tunisia compare to historical movements for freedom.  Assignments in the course will emphasize the reading and writing skills necessary for college success, and there will also be one oral presentation.  The summer reading for this course is the play Fences, by African American playwright August Wilson.