Last updated: June 8, 2020
Video
Dialog
Transcript
Man: It’s hard to imagine such a time when so much oppression occurred.
Woman: I cannot imagine what it would feel like to be owned by another person. There weren’t any rights. The slaves were sold. What kind of rights do you have when you don’t have a right to go where you want to go? I mean, basically, you’re not free.
Man: The stories are many, and of course some treated slaves very well. But they were still slaves and they knew it. Any others, they were pieces of property. Even if one is well-treated, one is still not a full human being when one is a slave.
Woman: They probably lived in a lot of anger and disappointment. Sadness. Hoping that things would get better, but not really feeling for sure if they were going to or not.
Man: And these are grown people, and I think that was the worst part of it. It wasn’t the physical punishment or abuse that they suffered. It was the mental anguish, it was the type of psychological trauma that slavery caused, that really made it so bad.
Man: It was a terrible experience. I think that others who do not have that heritage just do not understand or comprehend.
Choir: We shall overcome some day.
Title: Dialog A Conversation between two or more people. An exchange of Ideas.
Chris Lovett: Civil rights is one of the most important events in American history, because what it did was, it led to the fulfillment of the American dream. With the advent of slavery and the inability of the founders to address that issue in 1776, and subsequently until 1865, the American dream was never completely fulfilled.
Title: A Dialog on Civil Rights Define Civil Rights
Justin Holstin: I think all people are all created inherently equal. And that’s what civil rights means to me, is protecting those rights of each individual.
Karen Manners Smith: For me it’s the sense in which the state supports equality of opportunity and equality of legal treatment for everybody.
Pamela Scott: I guess the capability to follow your dreams or achieve your goals. And not be held back just because you look different from someone else or you had different beliefs from someone else.
Nathaniel Eugene Terrell: It’s not just an American issue for blacks obtaining civil rights. It’s a world issue.
Title: Civil Rights come to America
Crystal Lynn Crowder: I’d like to think that they came over on the Mayflower. But I am practical enough to realize that they didn’t come over for everybody.
Holstin: I think that civil rights has always been an issue in the world. I don’t think you can point back to one time.
Teresa Lynn Clounch: It’s been around for some time. And maybe it was just brought to the forefront by Dr. King and others who fought so hard. And because our skin color is different shouldn’t stop us from being able to sit at the counter with someone else.
Smith: Civil rights has been trying to come to America for the entire history. I think certainly you get an awareness of it at the time of the framing of the Constitution.
T.J. Temphton: As long as there has been discrimination in American’s civil rights I guess the push to be for equality has always been in America.
Title: Separate Rights?
Lovett: In the 1890s, the Supreme Court ruled in a case known as Plessy v. Ferguson, that separate but equal is constitutional, as long as both facilities are on equal footing. This included public transportation, educational facilities, lodging, et cetera.
Holstin: Segregation comes along, where segregation is considered separate but equal, but in reality separate is never going to be equal.
Mario Porras: Separate, you know, bathrooms and drinking fountains, and people – they were considered lower than what… the white people in society.
Scott: I felt that slavery was similar to segregation, that there was the same kind of oppression that went on during slavery, but it was just on a different level.
Ron McCoy: You change a lot of the terms but the essential social structure remains very much the same.
Sam Dicks: So that separate dominated society of the 20th century -- part of it was of course the equal part, but the equal part never was equal.
Title: Equal Rights
Terrell: There’s a psychological segregation that we have to worry about back in the ‘60s, and during the Brown movement, where slavery – they couldn’t – they stop you. So you didn’t even have a choice. At least back in the ‘50s we can go before the courts and have some say-so.
Dicks: The law cases that went on through the 1930s and 1940s and so on, with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and other organizations, they’re the ones that laid the groundwork, which eventually gave the precedent in Brown v. Board of Education.
Lovett: Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights leaders came to the conclusion that what you had to do was attack the very institutions itself legally, by legal challenges. By the late 1940s it became evident that if you could attack segregated public schools as separate and not equal, you would be much more successful in ending segregation in the United States than anything else.
McCoy: The tone that was set was the non-violent moral commitment, and every other rights movement has been compared to the early African American Civil Rights Movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, as a result of that tone having been set. So it’s not just about African American rights. It’s about everybody’s rights. And ultimately it’s not even just minority rights, it’s the rights of all people.
Title: Civil Rights to Human Rights
Lovett: in the mid-1970s the issue of civil rights transcended into a larger issue that we would know as human rights today. Today when we talk about civil rights, we’re really talking about human rights.
Heidi L. Hawkinson: Civil rights, I think, are human rights. It doesn’t matter – I mean, we’re all, you kow, we’re all one race. We’re all the human race. And no matter what color, creed, religion, sexual orientation, you know – whatever that you are, you’re still human.
Scott: With civil rights comes into play for me is the racial – or the ethnic groups, the religion, gender, that, you know, separate, I guess just being like being a basic human.
Gary Wyatt: But there’s enormous overlap here, in my view, and in some ways I would tend to see them as synonymous.
Crowder: Civil rights are under human rights – like a subsection of human rights.
Nneka Dodd: Human rights to me is for as how a person as an individual. Civil rights to me is as in the group. It’s based on, like, race, religion, gender.
Smith: Civil rights are something connected with the state and the government. Human rights are things which we, almost as a species, agree are things which we can protect on behalf of one another.
Porras: I think the difference between the two really isn’t.
Title: Right Now!
Dodd: We’ve come a long way. I believe that we’re not there yet. I believe that we need to, you know, need to do as far as more diversity programs, more cultural programs, just so we can understand each other. Because I still think that there is some misunderstandings between whites and blacks.
Wyatt: I think that in comparison to the rest of the global society, in some cases we’ve done well. But nevertheless, we’ve got a long ways to go.
Scott: eventually we’ll get to the point where everybody can come together and look at each other as, yeah, you’re different, but you’re no better or I’m no better than you are. You know, we can all be better together.
Temphton: You know, there doesn’t have to be this great divide just because we’re different. You know, that’s what makes us special and unique. And it makes the United States a wonderful place because we can meet lots of different diverse people from lots of different and diverse backgrounds.
Clounch: To have dialog with people that is not in a confrontive way – but learning about each other, sharing ideas with each other, that’s the best way we’re going to break down the barriers.
Porras: Talk with people. You know, if they don’t know nothing about somebody of a different race or lifestyle, you know, get to know them. Ask, you know, questions.
Holstin: Sometimes it’s very difficult to talk about issues like this, but we need to be able to face reality, and say this is what the issues are. This is why people are being discriminated against.
Terrell: Then maybe once we start defining terms and actually opening up a dialog, we can solve a lot of issues.
Wyatt: People need to develop the will to educate themselves, and then have the courage to act on that knowledge. Don’t laugh when you hear that racist joke. Examine your own soul when you make an attribution about somebody – whether it’s a woman or whether it’s a person who’s black or Hispanic. Be very careful. Recognize the potential for transcending these problems or recognize the potential to succumb to them. We have a world right now where people could go either way so easy. What does the future hold? I’m not sure.
Description
Accompanying video for Brown curriculum with closed captioning.
Duration
10 minutes, 31 seconds
Credit
Brown v. Board of Education NHS and Brown Foundation
Copyright and Usage Info