minority rights. During the Jazz Age, Ku Klux Klan
activities increased in the South and Midwest….A
migration of many blacks from the South helped to
create the “Harlem Renaissance.” . . .

In the unit on World War II, students look again at
the Holocaust and consider the response of Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s Administration to Hitler’s atrocities
against the Jews and other groups. . . . The racial
segregation of the armed forces . . . produced a
strong stimulus for civil rights activism when the
war ended. The relocation and internment of
110,000 Japanese Americans during the war on
grounds of national security was a governmental
decision that should be analyzed as a violation of
their human rights.

The unit on The Civil Rights Movement in the
Postwar Era” emphasizes the development of stu-
dents’ critical thinking about human rights in the
United States and about the application of the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights in modern times
to the resolution of human rights issues, . . . the
central role black Americans have played in this
century in expanding the reach of the Constitution
to include all Americans. Students review the
enormous barriers black Americans had to over-
come, … provisions enacted into the Constitution
in 1787, … the post-Civil War laws, . . . and the
continuing discrimination. Students read from
Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma …. to
understand “separate but equal.” Students study
the rise of the civil rights movement, its purposes,
and the legal battle to abolish segregation. Students
analyze Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
political and social activism,… the lives of leaders
in the civil rights movement, such as Rosa Parks and
Martin Luther King, Jr…..the leadership of the
black churches,. . . the extraordinary moral cour-
age of ordinary black men, women, and children and
the interracial character of the civil rights move-
ment. The expansion of the role of the federal
government as a guarantor of civil rights is exam-
ined … as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of
1965. Students learn about the Black Power move-
ment …. the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr., in 1968, which deprived the civil rights move-
ment of its best-known leader, but not its enduring
effects on Armerican life. Important literature of this
period is read. Other groups—including women,
Hispanics, American Indians, and the handi-
capped— organized to press for legislative and judi-
cial recognition of their civil equality. The conse-
quences of these movements should be noted.

22