Unit 5 Introduction to American Politics 46.101
Susan E. Gallagher, Associate Professor, Political Science Dept.
Email: susan_gallagher@uml.edu Faculty site: http://faculty.uml.edu/sgallagher
Assignment 5: The Great Society in the Civil Rights Era
Due via e-mail on 2/24. Please bring a copy to class on 2/25.
Note: These questions are strictly designed to ensure that you are keeping up with the readings.
Consequently, your answers need not include analysis or background information.
Instructions: Copy the questions below, type in answers, and email the completed assignment in
the body of an email to Susan_Gallagher@uml.edu.
1. Johnson labeled his ambitious domestic agenda "The Great Society." The most dramatic parts of his
program concerned _________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________. There were
environmental protection laws, landmark land conservation measures, the profoundly influential
________________________________, bills establishing a _______________________________
____________________________________, a Highway Safety Act, the __________________________, and a bill to
provide ________________________________________ against shoddy goods and dangerous products.
2. To address issues of inequality in ___________________, vast amounts of money were poured into
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________, especially to provide remedial services for poorer districts,
a program that no President had been able to pass because of the disputes over aid to parochial
schools.
3. Briefly describe LBJ’s “War on Poverty:”
4. From Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement”:
The decade spanned by the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation and the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 will undoubtedly be recorded as the period in which the legal foundations of
racism in America were ___________________. To be sure, pockets of resistance remain; but it would be
hard to quarrel with the assertion that the elaborate legal structure of segregation and
discrimination, particularly in relation to ___________________________, has virtually collapsed. On the
other hand, without making light of the human sacrifices involved in the direct-action tactics (sitins, freedom rides, and the rest) that were so instrumental to this achievement, we must recognize
that in desegregating public accommodations, we affected institutions which are
_______________________________ ___________________________. In a highly industrialized, 20th-century
civilization, we hit Jim Crow precisely where it was most anachronistic, dispensable, and
vulnerable—in hotels, lunch counters, terminals, libraries, swimming pools, and the like. For in these
forms, Jim Crow does impede ___________________________________________________________: it is a
nuisance in a society on the move (and on the make). Not surprisingly, therefore, it was the most
mobility-conscious and relatively liberated groups in the Negro community—_______________
______________________—who launched the attack that brought down this imposing but hollow
structure.
5. At issue, after all, is not _______________, strictly speaking, but _________________________________.
Last summer's riots were not race riots; they were ____________________________________________ in a
society where class and color definitions are converging disastrously.
6. Whatever the pace of this technological revolution may be, the direction is clear: the lower
rungs of the economic ladder are being _______________. This means that an individual will no
longer be able to _______________________________________________________________________
______________________________. It will not even be enough to have certain specific skills, for many
skilled jobs are also vulnerable to automation. A broad educational background, permitting
vocational adaptability and flexibility, seems more imperative than ever. We live in a society
where, as Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz puts it, _____________________________________________
___________________________________________. Yet the average educational attainment of American
Negroes is 8.2 years.
7. It goes without saying that any effort to combat demoralization and apathy is desirable, but we
must understand that demoralization in the Negro community is largely a common-sense
response to an objective reality. Negro youths have no need of statistics to perceive, fairly
accurately, what their odds are in American society.
8. What events helped to push LBJ to work with Congress to overcome resistance to voting rights
reform among Democrats in the South?
9. From South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327-28 (1966):
Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and
persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy
required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After
enduring _____________________________________________________________________, Congress might
well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia _________________________________________
_____________________.