History Civil Rights Coursework Sources Questions

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History Civil Rights Coursework Sources Questions

Question 1:

In September 1957, Elizabeth Eckford had applied to go to an all-white school, and she had been granted a place, but she still had a battle to fight. The evening before she was to go to the school, the governor of Arkansas announced that with black children in the school, it would be impossible to keep law and order. When she tried to gain access to the school, along with about 8 other black children, a crowd surrounded her and stopped her from getting in. Even the guard refused to let her past. In the end, she did not manage to get to school, and finally, she was escorted in by paratroopers sent by J.F. Kennedy.

In source A (written by Elizabeth Eckford), racism is clearly shown. There are seemingly ‘normal’ people, but they are acting in a very strange way – going hysterical just because someone of a different race is trying to get into their school. They are chasing a 15 year old girl away from a school just because of her colour, something that if Elizabeth had been born white, she would never have had to experience.

No one in the crowd would help her, as it says in source A:

‘I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kindly face. But when I looked at her again, she spat at me’

and when she tried to get some help from the guard:

‘…he raised his bayonet…’

This passage also shows that laws can be changed, to allow Eckford and her friends to go to school, but attitudes are not necessarily changed overnight because they were unable to get into the school because of the crowd of angry protestors around the entrance, blocking the way, and even the guard took no notice of the laws, never mind trying to protect her, nearly shooting her! It shows the depth of racism, that people would want to kill a 15 year old girl because all they see of her is her skin colour:

‘lynch her! lynch her!’

Question 2:

Source B backs up A because it shows that people were very racist:

‘The crowd let out a roar of rage’

‘Women cried hysterically, tears running down their faces’

This shows racism at its worst – these people were irrational and racist with no respect whatsoever for the feelings of Elizabeth, or any of the other children coming along, and treated them like a disease:

‘‘The Negroes are in our school’… they howled hysterically’

This goes along with what Eckford says in source A:

‘The crowd began to follow me, calling me names’

And these were supposedly normal people, as it describes a group of girls in source B:

‘A group of six girls, dressed in skirts and sweaters, hair in pony-tails,’

Source C also backs up source A because it shows a crowd following Elizabeth and shouting things at her (as it says in source A ‘The crowd began to follow me, calling me names’). Source C also backs up source B, as it shows ordinarily dressed people acting in an extraordinary way and acting hysterically, shouting at these black children  - their crime? Being black. It is a photograph, which is hard to tamper with, almost impossible in 1957, so this is rock-solid evidence that what Elizabeth Eckford and the reporter from the New York Times said was correct. Source B was from an article in the New York Times, from the liberal north of the country, so this could be biased towards to the black students, but nevertheless, both the sources back up what Elizabeth Eckford said in source A because they are two independent witnesses, and even if source B was altered slightly to make the article more dramatic, it still tells the truth, as is shown in source C, a photograph, which shows the guard in the background, doing nothing about the situation; and the crowd, which both sources A and B pick up on.

Question 3:

Martin Luther King always made his aims and methods very clear. He wanted integration, to be a part of white society and be an equal part of white society. In his most famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, he said what he wanted:

‘When we allow freedom to ring from every village… we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black and white, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual ‘Free at last! Free at last! Great God almighty, we are free at last!’ 

He wanted liberation, as this shows in the title of the magazine.

His methods were also clearly stated in many of his speeches and letters, as it shows in source D:

‘When the Negro uses force in self-defence he does not lose support, he may even win it, by the courage and self-respect it reflects… but if he seeks it [violence] and organises it, he cannot win.’

This shows that he thought that force used in self-defence was not a bad thing because it would be someone else who would have started it off, and it would show the self-respect a person has for themselves, but if he starts off violence, he is not going to win because he will have the police to answer to, or he will be killed from the violence thrown back at him. He wanted to be able to work with the current system, possibly to change it to make things fair, but nothing as drastic as Malcolm X.

Join now!

Source E and F show Malcolm X’s aims and methods. He wanted a totally separate state to white America, as is shown in his view of people who wanted to be white society, such as Martin Luther King:

‘…these integration-hungry Negroes about their ‘liberal’ white friends…’ (source E)

He also doesn’t think that whites will ever treat blacks equally:

‘Even though they appeared to have opened the door, it was still closed’ (source E)

His methods were violent. The title of the book source F comes from is ‘The Black Revolution’. This definitely does not suggest peaceful methods. and he ...

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