American Students Don't Know Much About US History

Vivian Malone Jones's effort to enroll at the University of Alabama led to George Wallace's infamous "stand in the schoolhouse door" in 1963.

According to the New York Times, "Students’ Knowledge of Civil Rights History Has Deteriorated, Study Finds," by Sam Dillon on 28 September 2011: When Julian Bond, the former Georgia lawmaker and civil rights activist, turned to teaching two decades ago, he often quizzed his college students to gauge their awareness of the civil rights movement. He did not want to underestimate their grasp of the topic or talk down to them, he said.

“My fears were misplaced,” Mr. Bond said. No student had heard of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, he said. One student guessed that Mr. Wallace might have been a CBS newsman.

Nazis block Jews from entering the University of Vienna.

That ignorance by American students of the basic history of the civil rights movement has not changed — in fact, it has worsened, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose board Mr. Bond sits. The report says that states’ academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem.

“Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history,” concludes the report, which is to be released on Wednesday.

Nazi storm troopers block the entrance to a Jewish-owned store.

The report assigns letter grades to each state based on how extensively its academic standards address the civil rights movement. Thirty-five states got an F because their standards require little or no mention of the movement, it says.

Eight of the 12 states earning A, B or C grades for their treatment of civil rights history are Southern states where there were major protests, boycotts or violence during the movement’s peak years in the 1950s and ’60s.

“Generally speaking, the farther away from the South — and the smaller the African-American population — the less attention paid to the civil rights movement,” the report says.

Gov. George Wallace attempted to defy the federal desegregation order on a hot June day

Alabama, Florida and New York were given A grades. Those states require relatively detailed teaching about the decade and a half of historic events, roughly bookended by the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling and the April 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the enactment of the federal Civil Rights Act a week later.

Many states have turned Dr. King’s life into a fable, said Mr. Bond, who now teaches at American University and the University of Virginia. He said his students knew that “there used to be segregation until Martin Luther King came along, that he marched and protested, that he was killed, and that then everything was all right.”

When Alabama Governor George Wallace stepped aside, Vivian Malone Jones entered the auditorium to register for classes.

Alabama, Florida and New York require teaching not only about Dr. King but also about others like James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi; Medgar Evers, the rights organizer murdered the following year in Jackson, Miss.; and Malcolm X, the Muslim minister who challenged the movement’s predominantly integrationist goals.

Some experts in history education criticized the report’s methodology. Fritz Fischer, a professor at the University of Northern Colorado who is chairman of the National Council for History Education, said it was unfair to give Colorado and some other states an F because of vague state history standards, when they are required by state constitutions or laws to leave curriculum up to local districts.

The national guard ordered Gov. George Wallace to step aside and escorted Vivian Malone and James Hood into Foster to become Alabama's first African-American students to register for class.

“The grading system they came up with does a disservice in putting the focus on requirements that certain states are unable to meet and will never be able to meet,” Dr. Fischer said.

Even though Colorado’s standards barely mention the civil rights movement, some Colorado schools teach the civil rights movement thoroughly, he said. “I’ve been in classrooms and watched them teach about the sit-ins and about the controversies between Martin Luther King and Malcolm,” he said.

The report is by no means the first to sound an alarm about nationwide weaknesses in the teaching of American history.

Over the past decade, students have performed worse on federal history tests administered by the Department of Education than on tests in any other subject. On the history test last year, only 12 percent of high school seniors showed proficiency.

The law center’s report noted that on that federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, seniors were asked to read a brief excerpt from the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, including the phrase, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Only 2 percent of the seniors were able to state that the ruling had been prompted by a school segregation case.

“I appreciate that they are shining a light on this,” said Kathleen Porter-Magee, a senior director at the Fordham Institute, a conservative Washington research group that produced its own report card on states’ American history standards this year. “We found that U.S. history standards were generally mediocre to awful, and this report finds the same thing.”

Even in schools that try to teach history rigorously, the civil rights movement may get short shrift because in the traditional chronological presentation of United States history, teachers often run out of time to cover post-World War II America, said Maureen Costello, a director at the poverty law center who oversaw and edited the report, titled “Teaching the Movement: the State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011.”

One reason the center decided to produce the report now is that 2011 is the 50th anniversary of crucial 1961 events, including the freedom rides. (source: NY Times)

Kenneth Clark and Brown v. Board of Education

From "Novel Expert evidence in federal civil rights litigation" by Gordon Beggs (The American University Law Review, 45, 1995)

In the consolidated cases known as Brown v. Board of Education, federal civil rights litigation came of age. The case, which heralded great change in constitutional law, public schools, and the fabric of society, also introduced the civil rights field to the debate regarding the use of novel forms of scientific proof as evidence.

At trial in Brown's consolidated case Briggs v. Elliott, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) presented dramatic testimony by Professor Kenneth Clark of the City College of New York.Professor Clark performed innovative psychological tests utilizing dolls to identify harms inflicted on the plaintiff children due to segregation. Professor Clark described the tests and his conclusion in response to questioning by Robert Carter of the NAACP:

A. I made these tests on Thursday and Friday of this past week at your request, and I presented it to children in the Scott's Branch Elementary school, concentrating particularly on the elementary group. I used these methods which I told you about--the Negro and White dolls--which were identical in every respect save skin color. And, I presented them with a sheet of paper on which there were these drawings of dolls, and I asked them to show me the doll--May I read from these notes?

JUDGE WARING: You may refresh your recollection.

THE WITNESS: Thank you. I presented these dolls to them and I asked them the following questions in the following order: "Show me the doll that you like best or that you'd like to play with," "Show me the doll that is the 'nice' doll," "Show me the doll that looks 'bad'," and then the following questions also: "Give me the doll that looks like a white child," "Give me the doll that looks like a colored child," "Give me the doll that looks like a Negro child," and "Give me the doll that looks like you."

By Mr. Carter: Q. "Like you?"

A. "Like you." That was the final question, and you can see why. I wanted to get the child's free expression of his opinions and feelings before I had him identified with one of these two dolls. I found that of the children between the ages of six and nine whom I tested, which were a total of sixteen in number, that ten of those children chose the white doll as their preference; the doll which they liked best. Ten of them also considered the white doll a "Nice" doll. And, I think you have to keep in mind that these two dolls are absolutely identical in every respect except skin color. Eleven of these sixteen children chose the brown doll as the doll which looked "bad." This is consistent with previous results which we have obtained testing over three hundred children, and we interpret it to mean that the Negro child accepts as early as six, seven or eight the negative stereotypes about his own group. . . .

Q. Well, as a result of your tests, what conclusions have you reached, Mr. Clark, with respect to the infant plaintiffs involved in this case?

A. The conclusion which I was forced to reach was that these children in Clarendon County, like other human beings who are subjected to an obviously inferior status in the society in which they live, have been definitely harmed in the development of their personalities; that the signs of instability in their personalities are clear, and I think that every psychologist would accept and interpret these signs as such.

Q. Is that the type of injury which in your opinion would be enduring or lasting?

A. I think it is the kind of injury which would be as enduring or lasting as the situation endured, changing only in its form and in the way it manifests itself. MR. CARTER: Thank you. Your witness.

Professor Clark's testimony, while founded on scientific principle, carried great emotional power, and therefore caused vigorous debate among the litigants and scholars as to its import. NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall, arguing on behalf of plaintiff schoolchildren, asserted the broadest inference that could be drawn from results of these tests: they proved actual harm done by segregated schools. Thus, minority schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment because they could not satisfy the separate but equal standard announced by the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Other NAACP lawyers, like many civil rights practitioners who would follow in their footsteps, struggled with the meaning of the novel scientific evidence that they were attempting to develop. One historian subsequently reported that Professor Clark's tests using the dolls were "the source of considerable derision" among plaintiffs' attorneys. William Coleman, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, acknowledged, "Of all the debunkers, I was the most debunking. . . . I thought it was a joke." Professor Clark, who also served as principal advisor on the expert testimony for the school desegregation cases, was well aware of the controversy. He recalled:

Thurgood [Marshall] kept his options open. He played the role of conductor beautifully. It was clear that Bob Carter was the most persistent, consistent advocate of the involvement of the social scientists at the trial level. Bob was way out on the limb, pretty much by himself. Most of the other lawyers felt this approach was, at best, a luxury and irrelevant. Thurgood Marshall didn't tip his hand, except that he did let Bob and me go ahead with the dolls.

John W. Davis argued on behalf of the defendant school officials.60 Davis chose to attempt to undermine the doll tests' stature as scientific evidence by invoking a sarcastic style of argument. He pointed out that Professor Clark purported "to speak as an expert and informed investigator."61 From an "intensive investigation" and "thoroughly scientific test," Professor Clark reached the "sound conclusion" that the plaintiffs suffered harm in their development.62 Calling the result "sad," Davis declaimed that the court was "invited to accept it as a scientific conclusion."63 In concluding, however, Davis attempted to turn Professor Clark's published research64 in the defendant’s favor by pointing out that a greater percentage of black children in northern schools preferred the white doll, thought the white doll was nice, and thought the black doll was bad.65 He declared, "Now these latter scientific tests were conducted in nonsegregating states, and with those results compared, what becomes of the blasting influence of segregation to which Dr. Clark so eloquently testifies."

The Court ordered reargument of the cases 67 and did not issue its opinion until May 17, 1954. Holding that racial segregation of children in public schools was a per se violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court found that segregation "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect the children's hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Noting the consistent findings in the Kansas and Delaware71 decisions that segregated schools injured the plaintiffs and denied them equal educational opportunities, the Court concluded that "[w]hatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority."

(http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/class/common/dolls_in_brown_vs_board.html)



The Open Mind Kenneth Clark and Brown v. Board of Education

Watch the full episode. See more The Open Mind.

Peter Irons: Jim Crow's Children

Anti-busing protest in Boston, 1976

Nothing Changes

Peter Irons begins Jim Crow's Children with voices from the past. Drawing from WPA interviews, he quotes former slaves talking about difficulties they faced trying to read. "If we told [Mr. Tabb] we had been learnin' to read," recounts one slave, "he would near beat the daylights out of us" (p. 1). According to Irons, little has changed. African Americans still confront serious barriers to acquiring equal education in the United States.

In a sweeping work that traces black education from slavery to the present, Irons, who teaches at [***], suggests that Brown v. Board of Education,[1] the landmark Supreme Court ruling calling for the desegregation of public schools in the South, failed blacks. Although instrumental in dismantling federal approval of de jure segregation, or Jim Crow, in the South, Brown failed to deliver equal education to African American youth, a goal that continues to prove elusive, even today.

Much like James Patterson's Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy,[2] Irons summarizes an ever increasing body of secondary literature on school segregation, adding weight to ascendant views that Brown did not end America's struggle with segregated education. In pursuing this goal, Irons provides a detailed summary of educational policy towards blacks beginning as early as slavery. He does an excellent job of showing, for example, that the South was never much of an outlier in either its racial views or racial practice, despite the absence of formal Jim Crow segregation in the North. Irons also does a deft job of summarizing the NAACP's strategy leading up to Brown, a story familiar to fans of Richard Kluger's classic work, Simple Justice.[3]

The full weight of Irons's book, however, does not come to bear until the second half. Dedicating six chapters to the reaction and results of the Supreme Court's ruling, Irons shows first how southern and later northern and western whites opposed forced integration. He documents white flight, busing controversies, and even terrorism in cities like Cleveland (which boasted large black populations and extreme white resistance). In his closing chapters, Irons picks through the ruins of desegregation, even interviewing black students and former plaintiffs in Brown, revealing that Jim Crow's spirit, if not his body, lives on.

The culprit, according to Irons, is the federal judiciary, and in particular the Supreme Court. If it weren't for the Burger and Rehnquist Courts, he contends, integration would have continued. The courts proved effective in the early stages of integration, first by forcing the South to submit to federal mandates, and later by imposing busing on the rest of the nation--only to concede ground in the 1970s and 80s by removing busing mandates and tolerating white flight out of heavily black districts.

Irons's argument is, undoubtedly, right. If the Supreme Court had continued to aggressively back desegregation, Jim Crow would have suffered. But, this is not the only reason to read Jim Crow's Children. In fact, Irons's work raises questions that are, in certain ways, even more interesting still. Irons shows that American whites, contrary to their oft-professed liberal proclamations about racial equality, proved reluctant to sacrifice what they perceived to be the future of their children for an abstract social ideal. And the Supreme Court, as much symbolic authority as it may possess, has been unwilling and (perhaps more important) unable to force Americans, over long periods of time, to do things they do not want to do. Herein lurks the most interesting part of Irons's study. He shows effectively not just that courts refused to back desegregation, but that white America refused to back desegregation. In pushing aggressively for the abstract goal of integration, Irons shows how the courts, through busing and other plans, destroyed American cities by driving white taxpayers from them, eroded faith in the courts as a means of protecting white interests, and drove a wedge between liberal left-wing elites and the white working class, thereby setting the stage for the impressive consolidation of power across class lines that we see in today's Republican Party.

Jim Crow's children then, are not just African American youths who may have been better off under equalization programs, but Republican crusaders like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and William Rehnquist who rose to power expressly to dismantle what the Warren Court had wrought. Brown created both a myth and a monster.

Why? That is the subject of another study. And yet, racism, although an obvious culprit, may not be the only force at work here. On the contrary, an even deeper force, long at work within America's social formation, is likely also to blame. That is the utility of segregated education to the preservation of class.

When confronting the prospect of having their children bused into inner cities, white Americans did not have to be racist to realize that their children would suffer. It may be true, for example, that integration among children of the same class is a positive good. But, it may also be true that integration of children from different classes may prove, and will likely prove, the opposite. This is not because black children are different racially, but rather because Jim Crow involves much more than simply racial separation.

Segregation in America, whether de jure or de facto, has always been about resources just as much as about race. The idea behind segregation, initially, was not simply to punish blacks, but to create an underclass that was limited in terms of what it could accomplish, and thereby better suited for the menial tasks assigned to it. There was a reason, in other words, that Mr. Tabb would have beaten his slaves. If they had learned to read, they would have been less suited to being slaves.

Although slavery is gone, class structure continues in America, as in most societies. In this respect, centuries of segregated schooling have served their purpose--namely, the perpetuation of a class system in which African Americans inhabit the bottom caste, performing menial tasks with limited hope of advancement. The prospect confronting white parents with forced busing then, was to suddenly have their children relegated to the same lower class, not simply by association with black students, but being sent to underfunded, poorly equipped schools with student bodies who lacked the appropriate cultural, not to mention financial, capital.

If Irons had pursued this angle of analysis, he may have been less harsh on the Supreme Court. After all, Brown itself was an ambitious move--one that most white Americans agreed with only insofar as it did not affect them personally. In fact, like the due process revolution for criminal rights initiated by the Warren Court, Brown was a radical step against the grain of American popular opinion, one that invited the very backlash it received.

History, for better or for worse, is rarely determined by a few old men, even if they are Supreme Court Justices. On the contrary, larger forces play into the reasons why Supreme Court justices rule the way that they do. Haunting the Warren Court, for example, was the Cold War. Irons doesn't consider this in his analysis, and yet scholars like Mary Dudziak have shown its effect.[4] In fact, if Irons had considered Dudziak's work, his conclusions would only have been stronger. After all, once the Cold War ended, there was little compelling reason to promote equal education, save perhaps abstract moral ideals. Like it or not, these have never governed educational, or any other policy, in the United States. (source: History Net)

Peter Irons: Jim Crow's Children

US Unemployment Rate for African Americans

From the Washington Post, "U.S. unemployment rate for blacks projected to hit 25-year high," by V. Dion Haynes 15 January 2010: Unemployment for African Americans is projected to reach a 25-year high this year, according to a study released Thursday by an economic think tank, with the national rate soaring to 17.2 percent and the rates in five states exceeding 20 percent.

Blacks as well as Latinos were far behind whites in employment levels even when the economy was booming. But throughout the recession, the unemployment rate has grown much faster for African Americans and Latinos than for whites, according to the study by the Economic Policy Institute. Moreover, the unemployment gap between men and women has reached a record high -- with men far outpacing women in joblessness.

The national trend is playing out in the Washington area, even though jobless levels are lower here.

In the District, researchers say, the unemployment rate during the third quarter of this year is expected to reach 6.1 percent for whites and 18.9 percent for blacks. Unemployment in Maryland is forecast to reach 6.1 percent for whites and 11.3 percent for blacks. And in Virginia, 6.3 percent of whites are projected to be out of work, compared with 13 percent of blacks.

The rate for Latinos in Maryland is expected to reach 7.6 percent. Researchers did not include data on Hispanics in the District and Virginia because the samples were too small.

Blacks, Hispanics and men have suffered the most mainly because they have been disproportionately employed in sectors hardest hit in the recession -- manufacturing and construction. For instance, the unemployment rate for blacks is expected to reach 27 percent in Michigan, which has been shedding auto industry jobs. Other states with jobless rates above 20 percent for blacks are Alabama, Illinois, Ohio and South Carolina.

The rate for Hispanics is projected to reach 22.2 percent in Nevada, which has experienced a dramatic slowdown in construction.

The results demonstrate that the Obama administration needs to do more to target groups with high unemployment rates, experts say. The Congressional Black Caucus wants the government to create training programs and jobs in low-income communities with the highest unemployment rates.

"It's like triage in an emergency room -- you take care of people who need the most help first and you help the others later," said Kai Filion, research analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. He said that the economic losses could result in a 50 percent poverty rate for black children, up from 34 percent in 2008.

The economic devastation for blacks and Hispanics is underscored in another study issued this week by a Boston-based nonprofit research organization called United for a Fair Economy. "State of the Dream," its annual report issued in connection with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, asserted that blacks and Hispanics are three times as likely to be poor as whites; that blacks earn 62 cents for every dollar whites earn; and that the family median net worth of whites in 2007 was $170,400, compared with $27,800 for blacks and Hispanics.

"We have a long history of discriminatory policies and practices, including outright segregation, redlining, misguided urban renewal plans and predatory lending, that have prevented people of color from building up personal wealth," said Brian Miller, executive director of United for a Fair Economy and co-author of the report.

According to the Economic Policy Institute report, the unemployment rate for blacks is projected to reach a not-seasonally adjusted rate of 17.2 percent in the third quarter of this year, up from 15.5 percent during the same period last year. And the rate for Hispanics is forecast to jump to 13.9 percent from 12.4 percent. The study is based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data and projections from Moody's Economy.com.

Researchers say the unemployment rate for whites will rise 5 percentage points from the beginning of the recession in December 2007 to the third quarter of 2010. But during that same period, they say, it will climb 8.6 points for blacks and 7.9 points for Hispanics. (source: The Washington Post)

The History of Racism - Episode 3 (part 6/6)

Bigotry Shaped a Great Baltimore City: Antero Pietila

From the Baltimore Sun, "Book review: 'Not In My Neighborhood' Ex-Sun author traces bigotry's role in shaping Baltimore," by Diane Scharper, 21 March 2010

Builder James W. Rouse is remembered as a visionary because of his shopping malls and new towns, like Columbia - promoted as free of racial discrimination. But Rouse had another, less egalitarian side, according to Antero Pietila, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and editorial writer. That side had shown itself a few years earlier in 1951 when, as vice president of the Northwood Co., Rouse looked the other way as blacks and Jews were excluded from the Northwood community.

Rouse is just one of the movers and shakers spotlighted in "Not In My Neighborhood," Pietila's eye-opening account of bigotry in Baltimore. The book spans about 100 years but focuses primarily on the years from World War II to the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, the time when race relations reached a boiling point.

With its sensitive subject, this groundbreaking book is a monumental effort. Pietila spent seven years researching the people and stories in this account, which contains nearly 40 pages of notes. With facts, maps and charts, the book seems heavy at times. But Pietila hooks readers with anecdotes and arresting details. His description of Jack Goldenson during the 1968 riots on the roof of his delicatessen with a gray machine gun aimed at a surging mob is riveting.

As Pietila sees it, Baltimore's racial problems were exacerbated in 1910 when an African-American lawyer set up an office on McCulloh Street in a house he had bought from a white woman. Soon afterward, Baltimore enacted the first law in U.S. history to prohibit African-Americans from moving to white residential blocks and vice versa. Segregation existed in many Northern cities, Pietila explains. Baltimore, though, used the force of law to "achieve systemic, citywide separation." Numerous other cities, including Richmond, Va., Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta, followed suit.

When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the 1910 segregation law seven years later, Baltimore leaders weren't fazed. Covenants and other private agreements were used to bar blacks and Jews from certain neighborhoods. After the Supreme Court declared those unenforceable in 1948, Baltimore became a pioneer in blockbusting.

A 1937 map from the Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation

Most U.S. cities had separate housing markets for whites and blacks. But Baltimore, Pietila explains, had a three-tiered market: one for gentiles, one for Jews and one for blacks. It worked like a racially charged game of musical chairs. Gentiles moved out when Jews moved in. When Jewish housing demand weakened, houses went to blacks. The migration of Jews and blacks proceeded north and northwest from the harbor to Ashburton, to Windsor Hills, to Gwynn Oak and Woodlawn. Later, Jews moved to Pikesville and the Reisterstown Road corridor up to Owings Mills and Reisterstown. Gentiles moved east toward York Road or north toward Carroll County.

The bottom line is this: Gentiles excluded Jews and blacks from their neighborhoods using both legal and illegal means. Unscrupulous speculators took advantage of home sellers and buyers. Mortgage companies redlined neighborhoods where people could not get a regular mortgage, forcing them to rely on unscrupulous rent-to-buy schemes. With blockbusting techniques, flipping, and subprime mortgages, Baltimore neighborhoods and bank accounts were destroyed - to say nothing of people's souls.

Pietilla blames Baltimore's racial troubles on many people, including blockbuster Manuel Bernstein. But some, like Dale Anderson, former Baltimore County executive, deserve more blame than others, Pietilla writes.

Pietila says Anderson tried to push blacks from Towson by building a thoroughfare through the heart of an African-American neighborhood, thereby effectively eliminating it. In Catonsville, Anderson and the Baltimore County Council replaced blacks' homes with snack shacks and gas stations. Throughout the county, they decimated at least 20 old African-American settlements.

Race relations in the city were also troubling. In 1966, the Baltimore City Council considered a bill outlawing racial discrimination in housing. When an interfaith group testified in support of the bill, the members were spat upon, accused of moral blackmail and threatened with death. The bill was defeated, 13-8. After the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Baltimore, like other cities, exploded. To prevent an all-out race war, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 on April 11, which included provisions for fair housing. But by then, as Pietila vividly describes it, Baltimore - with its ugly racial and ethnic prejudices - had shown itself to be anything but Charm City. (source: Baltimore Sun)

Angela Davis Speaks: 'The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975'

Angela Davis

From the Wall Street Journal Online, "The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975," by Steve Dollar, on 15 September 2011: If, as Winston Churchill said, "History is written by the victors," then perhaps it is rewritten by the janitors. Not that filmmaker Göran Olsson was on custodial duty the day he stumbled upon a small mountain of 16mm film reels stashed in the basement of the Swedish Television offices in 2007. But in reclaiming endless hours of interviews shot by crews dispatched to survey the volatile American political scene of the Vietnam Era—aka "The Sixties"—Mr. Olsson has done something close to that.

Angela Davis

Edited down to a remarkably concise 100-minute collage, "The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975" chronicles the Black Power movement from the inside-out. The documentary uses the vintage material, originally used for a series of broadcasts on Swedish Television (before going missing for some four decades) to present the major personas of the movement—Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and others—neither as larger-than-life icons of resistance nor the angry rabble-rousers demonized by the media. They're just regular folks, standing up for their own at a time when every facet of American society seemed to be turning upside down. The film's soft-spoken vibe is encouraged by the polite engagement of 16 Swedish journalists involved in the original interviews that were broadcast back in Scandinavia, as well as the laid-back grooves of a soundtrack composed by Roots drummer Amir "Questlove" Thompson.

Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Toure) interviewing his mother, Mabel R. Carmichael.

The discoveries of these pale strangers in a strange land are due, perhaps, to their foreign non-combativeness, but they get to truths that were largely overlooked by the major American networks. Mr. Carmichael interviews his mother about the family's hard times. Ms. Davis, her afro coiffure buoyant even in the California State Prison, schools her interviewer on the meaning of revolution and the question of violence. The encounters are mediated by a chorus of unseen voices, such as former Columbia University professor Robin D.G. Kelley, Brooklyn hip-hop star Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte and Ms. Davis herself, speaking in 2010.

Angela Davis interview

The aim is not to make revisionist claims as much as it is to frame the period in a broader, more human perspective, stripped of hype and hysteria. Though much of it feels past tense, the relevance has yet to fade. As Mr. Kweli relates, he was detained at JFK once, post-9/11, and questioned about a tape of Mr. Carmichael's he'd been listening to—somehow overheard when he'd called to make a JetBlue reservation. "The FBI is still scared of this man," he says. It's one of the revealing moments that make "The Black Power Mixtape" essential viewing. (source: Wall Street Journal)

Angela Davis speaks about growing up in Birmingham, Alabama 1963