YouTube Only Recording – Recorded Spring 2022 – You will be sent a link to a private playlist

As of press time, the Curriculum Committee is finalizing plans for the first two weeks of this class.  Possibilities include a guest speaker and a field trip to a museum, designed to enhance the subject matter.  Students enrolled in this class will be notified by email of these arrangement.

Week 3-6 will feature David Jeter with a continuation of his previous classes on this subject. In Part III we’ll finally reach World War II and its aftermath when many African Americans were confronted with the continued existence of racial discrimination in the form of Jim Crow and Segregation and the Separate but Equal Doctrine adopted by the US Supreme Court in 1896 in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson. 

 We’ll look in detail at the mistreatment of many returning Black World War II veterans, especially in Southern States, and the response of the Truman Administration to these events.  Those actions became the footing and foundation upon which the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was built.  President Truman’s decisions and actions with respect to Civil Rights and the need for the Federal Government to act so that all Americans would receive in reality the Constitutional Rights otherwise guaranteed under the Reconstruction Amendments – the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution – will be a large part of what we’ll explore.

Our goal in Part III will be to examine the impact World War II and its aftermath had on the evolution of Civil Rights for African Americans in America — a period we might refer to as the Birth of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in America.

Instructor:  David Jeter is a retired attorney who practiced in Blue Springs for nearly 35 years.  He received his undergraduate degree in history and his law degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, earning his J.D. in 1973.  He considers himself an amateur historian with wide-ranging interests.  He is a docent at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum and has taught about Truman’s life and times for SPARK in the past.