Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist and historian Julian Bond identified the "Master Narrative" of the civil rights movement in these terms:

Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the court, courageous Americans, Black and white, took protest to the street, in the form of sit-ins, bus boycotts and Freedom Rides. The protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Doctor Martin Luther King, aided by a sympathetic Federal government, most notably the Kennedy brothers and a born-again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial discrimination as a moral issue.

Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Dr. King was tragically slain in 1968. Fortunately, by that time the country had been changed, changed for the better in some fundamental ways. The movement was a remarkable victory for all Americans. By the 1970s, Southern states where Blacks could not have voted ten years earlier were sending African Americans to Congress. Inexplicably, just as the civil rights victories were piling up, many Black Americans, under the banner of Black Power, turned their backs on American society.

Bond described the master narrative as a flawed, politicised version of history used to forestall racial progress and consign movements for racial justice to the past. Nevertheless, it retains immense power and remains the foremost understanding of civil rights history in both the public imagination and the schooling system.

On this course, students will encounter the history of the civil rights movement through a series of challenges to the Master Narrative. We follow this traditional course of the movement, beginning with the Supreme Court Brown v Board of Education decision that declared segregation unconstitutional through to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. However, we also add alternative visions and experiences, expanding the timeline, geographies, and therefore the definitions of civil rights history.

As a part of this course, students will produce their own timelines and maps illustrating alternative narratives of civil rights history.