In your Final Essay Examination, you must address five (5) of the following six (6) essay topics. Each essay should be approximately 500 words. You should properly cite all of your sources in APA format, including textbooks and any other sources you may use.
Analyze the workings of the sharecropping system and explain why many African Americans preferred it to wage labor. Explain why so many sharecroppers ended up destitute and tied to a farm or plantation.
Analyze the main factors that impelled black people to leave the South, and the main factors that drew them North between 1914 and 1929. Explain why the Great Migration is considered a "watershed" (a turning point) in African American history.
Compare and contrast each of the following in light of the historical period in which they appeared: the "New Negro" movement, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, and the Harlem Renaissance. Analyze the relationships among them and explain why they appeared almost simultaneously, and why New York was so important to all of them.
Explain the various ways that the Great Depression and World War II affected African Americans in the South, North, and West, countryside and the city. Analyze their main responses to this economic disaster.
Explain the philosophy of nonviolence as articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement in the context of the Cold War and resurgent Southern segregationism. Evaluate how successful it was as a strategy in the many struggles that occurred between 1956 and 1966.
Analyze Black Power as a phase of the freedom movement and as a political outlook. Explain why it emerged after 1965, how it differed from the civil rights phase of the movement, and its overall impact on African American life and history in the last four decades of economic stagnation and political crisis.