Hello students, Welcome to Marydwilliams.com.
This is my professional website that will be a part of our learning experience during this semester. Each of you will be asked to visit this website and others as it relates to course instruction and assignments. As you know this course is interdisciplinary in its' survey of the American cultural, social, and political experience.
The course although online will be an expression of public and civic life engaging in the question of whether our rich and troubled past can help us move toward a future more just, loving and fruitful. The breadth of this course is to make a patchwork quilt, which is the best metaphor to express what is hoped to be accomplished during our learning experience; we seek to make something useful, beautiful, and enduring. A legacy patched together from many fabrics brought together by and for our different communities and cultures. We will pluck from the many fabrics of our history by exploring and imagining how our separate ways produced our common history, and our unfolding future. There will be music, poetry, history, documents, stories, films and opportunities for discussion on our platform Blackboard on our discussion page. We will explore a history as rich and complicated, painful and delightful as America itself.
Malcolm X The Ballot and the Bullet
Listen to it in its’ entirety but more specifically section beginning: (12:46-16:00)
Please copy and paste in a new window: https://youtu.be/3KmGrY3TOfw
During my lectures and presentations I will be highlighting the power of music from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond and its reflection on our history. We will immerse ourselves in the Southerness of this culture and investigate music as “ subtle activism”. This this speech by Malcolm X advocated taking a different approach
to Martin Luther King and others that believed in peaceful non-violent activism through protest using music and song as “subtle activism”. This segment of the course will address the purpose songs serve in unifying groups of people and moving them to common action.
After reading the materials and listening to the attached information, we will have an opportunity for further discussion.
This is the book cover. The following pages will be a short reading to be posted with the other documents I emailed earlier. Instructions: Students please read scanned pages 65, 66, 67. These are pages from the book Slave Religion The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South .