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Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Black Voting Rights
You can join LWVOC and OCPS in partnering with Harvard University for another Harvard Case Study Session
March 30, 6-8pm  FREE EVENT (food is not provided)
Boone High School, 1000 E. Kaley St, Orlando

Participants will be required to download materials for study and preparation as a REQUIREMENT for registration...deadline to register is March 26.

As part of your case preparation, we ask that you use the questions listed below to guide your reading. To make the program as productive as possible, it is important that you read the case and formulate answers to these questions in advance:

1. Given the 14th and 15th amendments, which guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” and voting rights irrespective of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (and which were ratified in 1868 and 1870, respectively), how did racial segregation and large scale disenfranchisement of black citizens become entrenched in the South over such a long period of time?
2. Why did the NAACP (founded in 1909) adopt a legal strategy to fight segregation and disenfranchisement in the early decades of the 20th century? If you had been around at the time, would you have been optimistic or pessimistic about this strategy?
3. How do you explain the timing of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision, which declared that “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal? Could this decision have come twenty years earlier? Fifty years earlier? Why or why not?
4. By early 1965, what was the SCLC’s strategy for securing comprehensive voting rights legislation? How had King and other leaders of the SCLC come to this strategy? If you had been advising civil rights leaders at the time, would you have endorsed the strategy or recommended a different one?
5. Imagine you had been marching beside King on March 9th and that he privately told you about the turnaround option and then asked for your advice about what to do. What would you have recommended and why?