• Website Demonstration and Discussion of "The North: Civil Rights and Beyond in Urban America"

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

This roundtable discussion will feature a presentation and demonstration of the digital history project entitled "The North: Civil Rights and Beyond in Urban America," a multimedia, interactive website offering a presentation and analysis of black resistance movements and community building activity in the urban north in the United States, from the 1950s to 2015, with a focus on the 1960s-70s. Even though research and investigation of the Northern experiences has led to many documentaries and books for our education and appreciation, no one has attempted to knit the many different threads into an interrelated story digitally formatted for public consumption, to enable a comprehensive understanding of the politics of race and class, the hallmark of the urban struggle and the major difference between the Civil Rights Movement, and these urban resistance movements. Therefore "The North," as a multimedia interdisciplinary and interactive website will: collect the stories of resistance in urban centers, primarily in the North; serve as a repository for the accumulation of written, oral and visual evidence that reveals the goals, objectives, strategies and tactics of the many phases of the struggle for freedom by black people and their supporters in the urban North, primarily in the 1960s and 70s; serve as a resource for the teaching of black political history at the college and grade school level, in collaboration with the faculty of Rutgers Newark and the Newark Public Schools.

This roundtable discussion will focus on the first of several cities to be featured in "The North": Newark, NJ.

Sub Unit

• 101st Annual Meeting and Conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Chair

• Junius Williams, Abbott Leadership Institute, Rutgers University

Discussants

• Peter Blackmer, 1988

• James Amemasor, New Jersey Historical Society

• Francesca Larson, Mosaic Strategies Group

• ASALH Audience, .