Tonight on our Agenda are 1960s Social Movements, the most powerful of which was for Civil Rights. Most don’t understand that the United States Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v Board of Ed in 1954 were outcomes of a more accurate reading of the 14th Amendment which applied the first 10 Amendments (The Bill of Rights) to all the States and not only the Federal Government; therefore we ALL benefitted from it, and not only what were thought of then as “minorities.” In any case, I am sure that our guest Barry I. Fredericks will be much more and better informed about these and other legal issues during “The Sixties and Beyond.” In preparation I have sent you the obituary of John Doar who was the US Assistant Attorney General for the Southern District at the time. For example, successfully prosecuting the killers of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman,Michael Schwerner in Mississippi, and Viola Liuzzo in Alabama. One of his colleagues in the DOJ was our guest speaker.
Barry I. Fredericks has had a distinguished law career in both private and government service. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, in the 1960s he served as Chief Counsel of the Division of Corporate Finance of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Trial Attorney in the Division of Civil Rights of the Department of Justice, Assistant U.S. Attorney, and subsequently U.S. Commissioner for the District of Columbia. Mr. Fredericks has been a faculty member at prestigious institutions such as the University of Virginia and University of Michigan Schools of Law. Among his many honors received was the William J. Brennan Award from the University of Virginia Law School in recognition of his contributions to Legal Education and Trial Advocacy.
We’ll start the class with a brief look at the PBS documentary “Klansville U.S.A.”
You should be working on your Biography Sites over Spring Break. Sara has added a tutorial for adding pages and customizing your site on the “Biography Site and Virtual Museum Resources” Page.
Jerome Krase
April 5, 2017 — 4:17 pm
On last Monday evening, our guest speaker Barry I. Fredericks, who as a Professor of Law has often done in the past, explained to us how our present is a product of the past. Specifically, how the explosive 1960s Civil Rights Movement was a product of historical forces during not just of the relatively calm 1950s but more so two centuries of Executive, Judicial, and Legislative decisions. These provided the pressure for the accumulated grievances that finally exploded, and not as some suggest the many horrible, racial incidents during The Sixties. In anticipation of this “revelation,” we had watched a piece of the PBS documentary Klansville USA.
Professor Fredericks also gave us an “Insider’s View,” or the “nitty gritty,” of the Department of Justice, and other Federal agencies such as the F.B.I. that gave us insight as to why so little real “justice” for African Americans happened as late as the 1950s. Combined with the political power of segregationist Southern States, even the 14th Amendment was of limited value to guarantee equal civil rights for all Americans.
All movements seem to have the same structural form and, to oversimplify, they range from the “non” to the extremely violent. Therefore, before Barry I. Fredericks spoke I outlined that structure and then we watched as noted CCNY psychologist Kenneth B. Clark interviewed Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. who represented at the time the two opposite poles of movement strategies.
As an aside I had asked why, given the treatment of women in American society, the Feminist Movement, had not taken am equally violent turn. I mentioned the attack feminists made on issues such as pornography and the sexual objectification of women and alluded to much worse. As a follow-up, I consulted several reliable sources and note the consensus that based on many reputable surveys one in five women will be raped at some point in their lives. We should consider therefore why sexual violence against women was not the main focus on the Feminist Sixties. Imagine if the episode we watched of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” had gotten even close to those “explosive” issues. As I noted, if you read The Warriors and compare it to the film version, you might get the point of not facing uncomfortable social realities.