Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer: 

Imagine you are a civil rights activist in the United States or an anti-colonial activist in the Caribbean, Ghana or South Africa in the 1960s. Which strategy of protest would you use: Non-violence (aka "civil disobedience), armed self-defense or guerrilla warfare (bombing government buildings and/ or aggressively attacking racist organizations such as the Klu Klux Klan)? Explain why. In your explanation, please reference at least TWO civil rights activists or freedom fighters who used your preferred method of political protest. 

All materials you may need:

Instruction of this module

Civil Rights Struggles around the Globe: This module explores the diverse modes of black resistance to white oppression in the United States, South Africa and the Caribbean throughout the twentieth century. From the 1920s through the 1940s, many black American activists (especially artists) joined the Communist or Socialist Party because they believed racial equality was connected to the political empowerment of working-class people of all racial backgrounds. This interracial, class-based solidarity spread throughout the United States and connected black Americans to working-class people of all races around the world.

Radical, black American performers and activists such as pianist Hazel Scott and actor Paul Robeson put on concerts abroad (especially in Europe), and they practiced black internationalism as they used their celebrity status to tell the world about racial discrimination and violence in the United States in order to shame the US government into reforming.

By the mid twentieth century, such radicalism gave way to the classic Civil Rights Movement in the United States--ranging from non-violent protests to armed self-defense. As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum in the US, the anti-colonial movement against European oppression and in favor of independent, black-run governments spread throughout the Caribbean and the continent of Africa. 

Reading: 
All reading covers the political activism and lives of radical black intellectuals including Barbados-born Communist political activist Richard B. Moore, Trinidadian-born Communist activist Claudia Jones, Socialist Party sympathizer Paul Robeson, American-born black advocate of armed self-defense Robert F. Williams, Pan-Africanist and first president of independent Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, and anti-apartheid leader and member of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela.