314 East 10 th Street, Oakland, CA 94606-2296
Phone: (510) 879-8253 - Fax: (510) 879-8607
Date: April 16. 2007
To: 11 th grade American History Teachers
From: Stan Pesick and Shelly Weintraub
Re: Preparing students for this spring’s district American history writing assessment
Below is information and an activity that can help you prepare students to write thoughtfully about this spring’s American history assessment topic. On the assessment students are asked to respond to the following prompt
Agree or Disagree: The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s successfully met the political, economic, and social goals of African Americans that not been achieved during the Era of Reconstruction.
I. Reading and Understanding the Prompt
This prompt asks students to agree or disagree with a statement that makes an historical judgment about the success of the Civil Rights movement. To develop and support their position students are asked to consider three different, but overlapping, areas – social rights, political rights, and economic rights. Understanding that they will need to discuss these three areas should help students work with the source documents – to determine, as they read, whether an individual document addresses the social, political, or economic question. Additionally, students should understand that it doesn’t have to be total agreement or total disagreement. That it might be possible to argue that the Civil Rights movement was more successful in meeting one of the areas, social rights for example, than successful addressing economic problems. It is important for students to understand that the prompt asks them to assess outcomes and each document will provide information to aid in that assessment.
II. What students need to understand about the topic’s historical context(s):
In order to thoughtfully frame and introduction and thesis students will need to understand

How the failure of Reconstruction led to the denial of social, political, and economic rights for African Americans in the South. That this failure led to the enactment of Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation; laws and practices
(i.e. poll taxes and the grandfather clause) that denied African Americans political power by denying access to the voting booth and therefore the opportunity to hold office and exercise political power; and economic structures such as sharecropping that kept African Americans in the south economically dependent on the white land owners.

The origins of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, along with different strategies employed by Civil Rights activists.
OUSD History-Social Studies / Preparing for the 11 th Grade Spring Assessment / page #1


That the passage of the 14 th and 15 th Amendments (two successes of
Reconstruction) become foundations, particularly the 14 th Amendment, for many of the federal laws and rulings in support of civil rights that came about between
1955 and 1968.

That segregation and discrimination was not limited to the South, but was prevalent in the North and West as well. They should understand that sometimes this took different forms and existed not by law, but by practice – the idea of de jure vs. de facto segregation.
III. Textbook (American Anthem) pages and sections connected to this prompt.
 “Reconstruction Ends” (pages 137 – 138) – a brief discussion of why
Reconstruction ended and the effect on African Americans in the South.
 “The Civil Rights Movement” (chapter 18, pages 554 – 593
IV. Practice Documents
Attached are four sources and an analysis guide that preview for students what types of documents and arguments they will be working with when they receive the assessment.
Providing students the opportunity to read, analyze, and discuss these documents before the assessment should help deepen their understanding of the assessment topic, and support higher levels of student achievement.
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OUSD History/Social Studies
Preparing for the Spring, 2007 District Assessment
Working with the four practice documents below can help you prepare to respond tho ughtfully to the topic for this semester’s district assessment in American history -
“Agree of disagree - The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s successfully met the economic, social, and political goals of African Americans that had not been achieved during Reconstruction.
Read the documents and complete the chart that follows.
Practice Document #1 –
“We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place…We have announced that such segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws.
- from the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , 1954
Practice Document #2
The biggest problem then was survival. I mean we were having major problems of hunger, even starvation. There were people in Mississippi who had no income. ..When you began to shift to food stamps and charge even two dollars per person, there were people in Mississippi who didn’t have that two dollars. It was very hard to get people from Washington to believe that there were families that could not afford a dollar or two.
- from Marian Wright Edelman testifying before Congress in 1967
Practice Document #3
By 1974 there were 1,593 black elected officials outside the South. By 1980 the number had risen to 2,455. Although black people in northern cities had been able to vote for a century, they had not been able to command an equal voice in city governance. The rise of black power and the inspiration of the Voting Righ ts Act (1965), however, signaled a new departure…In 1967 in
Cleveland, where the black population had skyrocketed after WW II, Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of a major American city…In the same year Richard G. Hatcher became mayor of Gary, Indiana, where the black population had also increased greatly after the war. Hatcher won by a mere 1,389 votes, getting 96 percent of the black vote and 14 percent of the white vote.
- from Darlene Clark Hine, African-American History (Prentice Hall, 2006, p. 830).
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Practice Document #4
Characteristics and percent of persons 65 years and older below poverty level (1959 – 1975)
Characteristic
All persons, 65 and over
- White
- Black
1959
35.2
33.1
62.5
Percent Below Poverty Level
1970
24.6
22.6
47.7
- Spanish Origin Not Recorded Not Recorded
- Male
- Female
59.0
63.3
38.9
49.8
1975
15.3
13.4
36.3
32.6
27.8
31.9
- from U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1979, p. 464
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Practice
Document #
Author, Date, type of document
(primary or secondary
Summary
–
What is the main idea?
Author Point of View
(if included in source)
How would you use this document to help respond to the prompt?
Which position does it support and why?
1 from the ruling of the Supreme
Court of the
United States in
Brown v. Board of Education of
Topeka , 1954
2
- from Marian
Wright
Edelman testifying before
Congress in
1967
3
- from Darlene
Clark Hine,
African-
American
History
(Prentice Hall,
2006, p. 830).
4
- from U.S.
Bureau of the
Census,
Statistical
Abstract of the
United States,
1979, p. 464
OUSD History-Social Studies / Preparing for the 11 th Grade Spring Assessment / page #5