Driving Question: Which rights have been most prominent in American thinking and debates?

This abstract of the Census from 1830 not only provides numbers, state by state, of free and enslaved persons – but students will note that there are enslaved persons in many of the states they consider “free” (sample pages at left).

Note that the terminology is historically accurate but might be offensive to students unless context is provided (this will be true for many of the documents from this era).

Nat Turner’s Rebellion led to both public debate and a tightening of laws and policies. “Nat Turner was an enslaved man who had learned to read and write and become a religious leader despite his enslavement; following what he took to be religious signs, he led other enslaved people in an armed uprising. The violence of the uprising and Turner’s ability to escape and hide for approximately six weeks following the event led to changes in laws and policies and also led to a widespread climate of fear among white slaveholders. Enslaved people in far-flung states who had no connection to the event were lynched by white mobs. The State of Virginia briefly considered ending the practice of slavery in the wake of the rebellion, but they ultimately decided instead to tighten the laws of slavery.

While the Trail of Tears and “Indian Removal Act” are not central to understanding slavery, they are critical events in the history of the country in this era; in addition, the concept of “indian removal” connects directly to tensions that rose as the nation expanded in both population and territory.

As the United States acquired Western territories, and as the power battle between slaveholding and free states continued, the land on which Native nations lived became increasingly valuable. After President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee nations were forced to move from their land, most often on foot and with the deaths of many people, into Western territories. The 1838 forced removal of the Cherokee people from their Georgia land led to the deaths of thousands of people (exact numbers are unknown, but estimates range around 4,000 - 5,000.)

“On May 26, 1836, the House of Representatives adopted a ‘Gag Rule’ stating that all petitions regarding slavery would be tabled without being read, referred, or printed….The enactment of the Gag Rule, rather than discouraging petitioners, energized the anti-slavery movement to flood the Capitol with written demands. Activists held up the suppression of debate as an example of the slaveholding South’s infringement of the rights of all Americans.”

As the nation expanded Westward, tensions rose further over whether new states and territories would permit or prohibit slavery.

“The pact set a border between Texas and Mexico and ceded California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming to the United States. …the acquisition of so much territory with the issue of slavery unresolved lit the fuse that eventually set off the Civil War in 1861.”

Students would benefit from reading an excerpt of the text of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – but in addition, the cover itself is an interesting artifact, and students can discuss its details and its possible impact upon publication in 1845. (See also text in this chart, below, from Frederick Douglass’ July 4 address in 1852.)

As new states were added to the nation, the question of how many would permit slavery and how many would prohibit it – and, therefore, which faction had more power – continued to contribute to growing tension.

This map has a range of valuable information, not only about Presidential politics, but also about population statistics and slavery. It makes a particular point of comparison with the 1830 Census, hyperlinked above in this chart.

See above; understanding the life and words of Sojourner Truth helps students to understand the complexity and intersectionality of both the women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement.

“The years of 1854-1861 were a turbulent time in Kansas territory. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 …allowed the residents of these territories to decide by popular vote whether their state would be free or slave. This concept of self-determination was called popular sovereignty'. …Three distinct political groups occupied Kansas: pro-slavers, free-staters and abolitionists. Violence broke out immediately between these opposing factions and continued until 1861 when Kansas entered the Union as a free state on January 29th. This era became forever known as ‘Bleeding Kansas’.” (National Park Service, link at right.)

This photograph pairs with the text in the row below from the Women’s Rights Convention of 1853, when Sojourner Truth spoke to the group.

The Women’s Rights Convention: The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is a significant event in the fight for women’s rights and for women’s suffrage, though activists at the convention itself debated whether suffrage should be the center point of their platform. In addition, the Seneca Falls Convention is now widely understood to represent some tension between the women’s rights movement and the abolitionist movement; some activists at the time felt that the right to vote should not go to black men before white women. In this collection of documents, Sojourner Truth’s speech to a smaller, subsequent convention – one held in New York in 1853 – is included, largely because of the critical role Sojourner Truth plays in demonstrating the importance of the intersectionality of both the women’s rights and abolitionist movements.

The Election of 1800 was a bitter partisan battle. This article highlights the opposition felt towards incumbent president John Adams, focusing on both political and moral failings on his behalf. Adams would go on to lose New York’s vote and the presidency.

In this cartoon from 1797, as Monticello Classroom explains, "Jefferson’s political enemies portrayed the then-vice-president as dangerously pro-French, un-Christian, and un-American. Jefferson kneels ready to sacrifice the U.S. Constitution …[as] God and an American eagle oppose him, as Satan happily looks on.”

Thomas Paine did not hesitate to critique John Adams and the federalist party during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. As a result, federalists published this image of Thomas Paine working with the devil to bring down the Nation.

According to the Library of Congress, “State and federal laws governing elections and citizenship are listed in this anonymous broadside, clearly published with an eye to the elections leading up to the national presidential election of 1800. In Pennsylvania, Federalists and Republicans battled to elect supporters for the state legislature so that they could control the selection of presidential electors. In the end, Pennsylvania’s electors split their votes between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.”

Newspapers during the Election of 1800 were very partisan and did not shy away from personal and private attacks on candidates. Samuel Harrison Smith started the National Intelligencer as a Republican affiliated paper at the behest of Thomas Jefferson.

James Calendar was a partisan editor who wrote this piece denouncing John Adams on the basis of his moral failings.

The election of 1860 came with stark partisanship between candidates Abraham LIncoln, John Bell, Stephen A. Douglas, and John C. Breckinridge. In this cartoon, Lincoln wins “The National Game” by using his "good bat" –– a wooden rail labeled "Equal Rights and Free Territory.”

This political cartoon is anti-Lincoln, pointing to his leadership as the reason for the South seceding from the Union.

In this cartoon, Lincoln is dressed as a “Wide Awake,” a member of a Republican-supporting youth group in the North. In the background, we see incumbent James Buchanan helping the other presidential candidates through the window of the White House. This depicts the partisan splits leading up to the 1860 election.

The intense partisan debates around the Election of 1860 alluded to the coming violence and secession of the Civil War. In this cartoon,  each candidate works to pull the “National Map” further apart.

The “Wide-Awakes,” a youth movement, formed first in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860. Influenced by published writings and songs about their movement, clubs formed throughout the north and midwest. The groups were Republican-leaning, abolitionist, and increasingly paramilitary over the course of the year leading up to the election.

This image ran in Harper’s Weekly and shows the Wide-Awakes carrying torches and wearing uniform capes at a rally in New York.

Prior to this event, presidential candidates had never before debated on television. Television introduced new challenges and offered new opportunities to the candidates; their appearances, body language, expressions, and live interactions were now broadcast to a wide audience for immediate scrutiny.

This letter concerns the use of television for the presidential debate, and the work required with ABC, NBC, and CBS to televise these debates.

This document describes an appearance by John F. Kennedy, then a candidate, on television. The importance of the new medium is emphasized in phrases such as, “Senator Kennedy . . . makes a planned, strong, and dramatic closing statement . . . which excites and brings the audience to its feet.”

This news article, published forty years after women received the right to vote, describes the limited role women have in the 1960 political conventions and campaign.

Message from Nixon to the pathbreaking Black baseball player Jackie Robinson on his contributions to the 1960 campaign, with a reference to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. being jailed in Georgia.

This political cartoon is a commentary on the televised presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Television was a new medium in the 1960 presidential election; in the image, patriotic icons Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty watch the candidates wrestle on a giant television.

Political cartoon of presidential candidate Richard Nixon, from the 1960 presidential election.

Following the lynching murder of her fifteen-year-old son, Emmett Till,, Mamie TIll Mobley insisted on an open casket at his funeral; according to Time magazine, “When Till’s mother Mamie came to identify her son, she told the funeral director, ‘Let the people see what I’ve seen.’” The graphic images of his beaten body captured the attention of people across the United States, and the photo’s publication in Jet magazine is widely considered a galvanizing moment for the Civil Rights Era.

The March on Washington, 1963By 1963 the Civil Rights Movement had grown substantially. They had support for both the black and white communities, as well as many celebrities. The purpose of this march was to gain national support for legislation in Congress. One of the most famous moments of the march was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech. Originally proposed in 1941 as the “March for Jobs and Freedom” by A. Philip Randolph, photographs of the March became – and remain – some of the most iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement.

Any number of images from the Civil Rights era would benefit a unit on freedom of speech, but this particular image does a few things: (1) it marks the occasion immediately before Martin Luther King’s assassination; (2) it provides an image of a single text used over and over, in contrast to the image above with multiple demands; and (3) it juxtaposes protesters exercising their first amendment rights with National Guard troops wielding weapons.

Aware of the platform provided by international television coverage of the Olympics, medal-winning U.S. track athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith chose to raise a fist during their medal ceremony to protest racial inequality in the country they were representing, at the very moment the Star Spangled Banner was playing.

The 1970s Women’s Strike was organized by feminist author Betty Friedan, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which prevented women from being denied the vote “on the basis of sex.” As reported by Time, “Friedan’s original idea for Aug. 26 was a national work stoppage, in which women would cease cooking and cleaning in order to draw attention to the unequal distribution of domestic labor, an issue she discussed in her 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique. It isn’t clear how many women truly went on ‘strike’ that day, but the march served as a powerful symbolic gesture. Participants held signs with slogans like ‘Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot’ and ‘Don’t Cook Dinner – Starve a Rat Today.’”

Vietnam War ProtestsThe Vietnam protest movement represented a growing anti-war movement in the United States in the late 1960s to early 1970s. Protestors spanned the racial spectrum and employed varying methods to end the war in Vietnam, started by the United States.

In many cases, anti-war protests combined with efforts to turn attention to domestic issues. As described in the Mapping American Social Movements Project of the University of Washington, “Chicanos in Los Angeles formed alliances with other oppressed people who identified with the Third World Left and were committed to toppling U.S. imperialism and fighting racism…. The Chicano Moratorium antiwar protests of 1970 and 1971…reflected the vibrant collaboration between African Americans, Japanese Americans, American Indians, and white antiwar activists that had developed in Southern California.”

The Civil Rights Movement for Black equality inspired many other movements, including a national push for disability rights. The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability and protected equal access for people with disabilities in areas including public services, employment, and education.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) states: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." First proposed as an Amendment to the Constitution in 1923, Congress finally passed the ERA in 1972. The senate vote was overwhelming: 84 to 8. The Amendment then went to state legislatures for approval, requiring 38 for ratification. 22 states ratified in that first year, and 8 more in 1973. But then a grassroots opposition movement made significant inroads. 35 states eventually approved it by 1977, but the passage of the Amendment then stalled and the deadline expired in 1982.

In these photos, women who fought both for and against the Amendment’s passage are pictured protesting. In the top photograph, American attorney and conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, founder of STOP-ERA, leads a protest against the Amendment. In the bottom photograph, women dressed in white – evoking suffragists of the past – protest in favor of the Amendment in Washington, DC on August 26, 1977 – the same date of the Women’s Strike seven years earlier (also included in this Spotlight Kit).

Dolores Huerta Lettuce Boycott Poster:Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez fought together for the rights and protections of the workers who picked fruits and vegetables in the fields and orchards, organizing a workers’ union and boycotts to gain attention and create economic pressure for the cause. Huerta led a successful lettuce and grape boycott, first in California and later on a national scale, that paved the way for migrant labor protection laws.

In the earliest years of the emergency of AIDS as a public health crisis, the American Government’s response was limited in terms of both resources dedicated to fighting the disease and public discussion of the disease, its victims, and public health strategies for prevention. Activists coined the phrase “silence=death” in 1987 to help raise awareness and spur the government to devote greater resources and attention.

After the financial crisis of 2008, a CNBC commentator, Rick Santelli, argued against President Obama’s mortgage relief policies and evoked the Revolutionary War-era Tea Party in calling for a protest against them. The “Tea Party Movement” took hold among some conservative and libertarian circles, leading to rallies and political campaigns arguing against federal taxation and in favor of fiscal conservatism and a free market economy. Several rallies were held specifically on April 15th – Tax Day – 2009.

The planned construction of The Dakota Access Pipeline and resulting protests is a recent example of Native Americans and U.S. industry clashing. One side feared for the quality of their water and lands being abused. Proponents of the pipeline included union members and business, who viewed the pipeline’s development as essential to the growth of the economy.

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the intersection of disability rights and racial equity can be complicated for deaf members of the Black Lives Matter Movement: “The phrase begins with four fingers cut across the brow, followed by two thumbs drawn up like breath from navel to chest, ending with a fierce tug with two hands down from the chin into fists toward the heart.

Black. Life. Cherish. This is how Harold Foxx and many other black deaf Angelenos sign ‘Black Lives Matter,’ though it is by no means a universal translation. .. It is a reminder of an ongoing struggle for equity, representation and authenticity in ASL, a language deeply scarred by racism and exclusion.”

On June 5, 2020, CNN reported: “Washington, DC is painting a message in giant, yellow letters down a busy DC street ahead of a planned protest this weekend: BLACK LIVES MATTER.

The massive banner-like project spans two blocks of 16th Street, a central axis that leads southward straight to the White House. Each of the 16 bold yellow letters spans the width of the two-lane street, creating an unmistakable visual easily spotted by aerial cameras and virtually anyone within a few blocks. The painters were contacted by Mayor Muriel Bowser and began work early Friday morning, the mayor’s office told CNN. Bowser has officially deemed the section of 16th Street bearing the mural ‘Black Lives Matter Plaza,’ complete with a new street sign.”

During the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, all levels of government – federal, state, and local – were required to respond to information emerging daily about what policies and practices would be safest for the public. In many places, including public spaces and schools, people were required to wear masks. Some people pushed back against these requirements, arguing that mandates were a violation of their individual rights.

While “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) is taught primarily in law schools, protests began in 2021 against the teaching of CRT at local school board meetings in many places across the country. Often, participants in these protests raised a range of concerns about how topics including, but not limited to, race are covered in school curricula. These protests became part of a larger “parents’ rights” movement, arguing that parents should have a greater say in determining what their children learn in school.

As reported by NBC News, “Last winter, as violent attacks against Asian elders began to spike, vividly painted portraits of Asian, Pacific Islander and Black people — flanked by vibrant florals and messages like ‘I am not your scapegoat’ — appeared on the walls of New York City's busiest subway and bus stops. Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s I Still Believe In Our City public art series, created in partnership with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, reminded millions of commuters of the humanity, diversity and beauty of Asian Americans at a time when many saw them as mere carriers of a deadly virus.”

As reported by the New York Times in March of 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed House Bill 1557, “which supporters call the ‘Parental Rights in Education’ bill, but that opponents refer to as the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill.” Among the provisions of the bill, “Instruction on gender and sexuality would be constrained in all grades; schools would be required to notify parents when children receive mental, emotional or physical health services, unless educators believe there is a risk of ‘abuse, abandonment, or neglect’; and parents would have the right to opt their children out of counseling and health services.”