Led by Prof. Nikki Brown (University of Kentucky)
Course Number: AMHI 677
Semesters: Fall 2025, Spring 2024
Image: Typed manuscript with handwritten notes for Address of Booker T. Washington, Principal of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama, before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, 1896 (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC07934)
While Reconstruction policies attempted to bring Black people (free and formerly enslaved) into the American fold, the abrupt end of Reconstruction brought the end of the promise of full American citizenship for all African Americans. Following the codification of the Jim Crow laws with the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, there was an emergence of African American activism across the political spectrum that carried into the Civil Rights Movement and its many forms—legal, educational, political, and grassroots. This course addresses the rise, institutionalization, fall, and lasting impact of racial segregation laws in the United States. Students will examine the growth and popularity of Jim Crow laws and spend particular time exploring the ways African Americans mitigated, or tried to moderate, the worst excesses of these laws.
Lecture 1: “Reconstruction and the Nadir, 1865–1900”
Nikki Brown, Professor of History and African American and Africana Studies, University of Kentucky
Nikki Brown has been teaching American and African American history since 1999. Her book, Private Politics and Public Voices: Black Women’s Activism from World War I to the New Deal (2006), won the Letitia Woods Brown Award for Best Book in African American Women’s History in 2006. The major themes in Brown’s work are gender, race, identity, representation, and politics. She is also a professional photographer, and has recently completed a photography project on African American men in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She is currently working on a book about Louisiana’s Civil Rights Movement.
The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.