This course traces the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from World War II through the 1960’s and to the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement . What strategies have activists pursued to press for racial equality? How have activists working for racial justice organized their efforts in the past and present? The course focuses on organizations that have emerged to press for racial equality and the strategies they have pursued to achieve their goals, from litigation and legislation to mass protest, economic self-help and racial separatism. Attention will be paid to well-known movement leaders from Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X to W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Jesse Jackson and Alicia Garza. But as importantly we will examine the efforts of unknown rank-and-file activists—women, workers, and young people, in particular—in local communities from the rural South to urban North. Finally, the course examines debates over police violence, mass incarceration and educational inequality in the post-civil rights-era.