In this lecture, Professor Holloway offers a richer portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. than his "I Have a Dream Speech" speech provides. Though King's message and delivery are precious moments in this nation's history, and excerpts are familiar to virtually all American school children, King's opinion of society and its remedy have been frozen in time and reduced to a few moments of his famous speech.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement have become embodied in each other. But in this lecture, Professor Holloway asks: what of the other activists in the struggle? What of the other organizations involved in the struggle? And what of the history of the struggle before King reluctantly emerged on the scene?

In this lecture, Professor Holloway presents an overview of the civil rights events that took place between the end of World War II and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. A critical survey of the histories behind such famous events as the desegregation of the Armed Forces, the formation of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the elimination of the all-white primary, and the Supreme Court's Brown decision demonstrate how complicated the story of the civil rights movement is.

In this lecture, Professor Holloway continues discussing African American political possibilities in the second half of the 1930s by examining the new mentality at work in black America. He focuses on the National Negro Congress, the Marian Anderson Easter Sunday Concert, and the March on Washington movement. These examples reveal the diverse strategies and organizing methods employed during this era, as the federal government learned that it could not afford to ignore black leaders the way it had since the founding of the Republic.

The 1930s was a decade filled with economic, legal, political, and social controversy. In this lecture, Professor Holloway looks at the Great Depression and the federal government's responses to it, including the New Deal's impact on African Americans, both materially and symbolically. As the federal government openly courted their favor, African Americans organized various political groups to monitor federal activities.

The Harlem Renaissance brought together legions of black writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals who celebrated black culture and romanticized its connections to an African past. In this lecture, Professor Holloway documents some of the expressions of the Harlem Renaissance (also known as the New Negro Renaissance), the political and cultural movement that claimed Harlem as its figurative capital.

In this lecture, Professor Holloway discusses the New Negro mentality, a new black consciousness forged out of political and economic frustration and the cultural shocks of the Great Migration. The New Negro ideology was articulated on a wide scale after World War I, when the promises of democracy at home went unfulfilled. Marcus Garvey best articulated this new consciousness through his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the first organized grassroots mass protest movement in African American history.

In this lecture, Professor Holloway expands our understanding of "The Great Migration" by looking at what happens when African Americans settled in Northern and Midwestern cities. He examines the 1917 East St. Louis race riot, the 1919 Chicago race riot, and the NAACP's Silent Protest Parade from New York City's Fifth Avenue to Harlem. The second portion of the lecture is on African American soldiers' experiences abroad during World War, their rising expectations for citizenship rights when they return, the new militancy that they espoused, and the racial backlash against them by whites.

In this lecture, Professor Holloway documents the "Great Migration," beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century and continuing with increasing pace until the mid-1920s. During this time, black Americans relocated from the rural South to the urban North. This general shift in the population marked a moment of self-determination for African Americans, demonstrating that they were prepared to leave behind the lives they had made in the South for better opportunities elsewhere.

In this lecture, Professor Holloway explains the two major schools of thought that emerged at the end of the century to solve the problems of black social and economic distress. The accommodationists, like Booker T. Washington, believed that the quickest way to improve the quality of black life was to forge a social peace with powerful whites, temporarily accepting the continued separation of the races and advocating vocational education as a pragmatic way for blacks to improve their lives. Opposed to Washington were people like Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B.