TOPIC 9.1 Contextualizing the Conservative Revolution

Race & the Rise of the “New Right”: Updated 2015 DBQ

Color-coded Examples / S.P.Y. Gallery Walk / Outside Evidence

Unit 9: Explain the context in which the United States faceD...domestic challenges after 1980.

Objective 1: Students will contextualize the Conservative Revolution amidst declining efforts to ensure Civil Rights for all Americans.

Objective 2: Students will self-evaluate their proficiency in document analysis skills

This objective in an Antiracist classroom:

“The most significant cause of the rise of a new conservative movement was a racist white backlash against the civil rights movement…They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record is clear: It was segregation.” - Historian, Dr. Randall Balmer

The College Board made a strange choice to avoid race as a category of analysis in their 2015 DBQ. This was clearly a case of appeasing political actors rather than a choice based on the consensus of historians in this field. It would be impossible for students to take an actual college-level course and not be exposed to the power of the anti-Black backlash that fueled parts of the rise of the “New Right.” Analysis of the rise of the Reagan Revolution that fails to address race, lacks serious academic credibility.

After students attempt the College Board’s selected documents to explain the causes of the rise of modern conservatism, introduce them to historian Dr. Balmer’s claim that anti-Black racism was at the center of the rise of the “New Right.” Provide students quotes from the architects of the movement and allow them to decide for themselves. The following quotes are upsetting, but these are quotes from powerful men who shaped our society. It is our duty as history teachers to provide the sources and allow students to use their own analytical skills to make their own judgments.

Allow the Architects of the “New Right” to speak for themselves

“You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968…had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people…We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be black, but by getting the public to associate…blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing (it)… we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

- John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon

“Let’s remember… that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No…what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.” 

- Paul Weyrich, architect of the Religious Right, 1990, meeting with other Religious Right leaders

“You start out in 1954 by saying, “N******, n******, n******.” By 1968 you can’t say “n******”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “n******,  n******.”

- Lee Atwater, Reagan advisor, promoter of “States Rights” messaging of the Southern Strategy, and architect of the rise of the New Right

"If Chief Justice (Earl) Warren and his associates had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the (Brown v. Board) 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line…The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.”

- Televangelist Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University, quote from a different sermon that the College Board did not select for their DBQ

Notes

This “gallery walk” activity goes with Document 6 of the 2015 DBQ on the rise of the modern conservative movement. You can do this as part of feedback after they write the DBQ or you can do the activity without the full DBQ and just have the students take 5 minutes to review the prompt and S.P.Y. the document.

My students became much better writers after I developed the S.P.Y. document analysis strategy while at the official AP exam reading in the summer of 2019. The gallery walk idea emerged later after I realized some students were still not grasping exactly what it meant to “use a document to support their thesis” or exactly what it meant to analyze an author’s perspective or purpose.

The gallery walk explained in the lesson plan will only take 10-15 minutes but I have also added a valuable addition to the lesson which is a review of secondary source material. I love discussions on secondary sources after SPYing a primary source because that is when it feels like we are really doing college-level history. Like many previous lessons, this leads to a powerful and very relevant discussion about the merits of the theories surrounding systematic racism. This past year, these two questions in particular led to the most thought provoking discussion from my students:

-        What do you think about the quality of the sources/examples? Does this give Dr. Balmer’s claim more or less credibility?

-        Why do you think the College Board avoided this type of evidence as they prepared your DBQ?

- Do you think the College Board’s decision to avoid primary source examples based on racism gives them more or less credibility?

I hope that you find this lesson helpful.  As always, I’d love your feedback or comments after trying it.  What worked?  What would you change?