In this lecture, Dr. Totten argues African Americans fought against segregation and disfranchisement since their enactment after the end of Reconstruction. Black communities resisted attempts to deprive them of their 14th and 15th amendment rights in the form or organization, protest, and solidarity. Some worked within the system, like Booker T. Washington and Madam C.J. Walker, while others like W.E.B. Du Bois sought to reform the system. The experience of the First World War, the interwar years, the Great Depression, and the Second World War created the New Deal Coalition and reinvigorated the fight for black equality. While Truman's administration furthered this progress, white southern segregationists threatened the Democratic coalition, by illustrating they would bolt the party over civil rights. These actions would presage the ultimate demise of the NDC in 1968. The final straw occurred in 1954 with the Brown v. Board decision that declared segregation in public education illegal. However, Brown II allowed southern states to implement this at their own pace, which opened the door to massive resistance. White southern segregationists pledged their opposition to the ruling and enacted a battery of measures to prevent equality, integration, and justice. Caught in the middle were common children like Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered by white segregationists in Money, Mississippi merely for speaking to a white woman. The atrocity galvanized a generation of civil rights advocates and led to a new phase of the movment.

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