In “Harlem,” Hughes explicitly considers the destructive consequences of lost or forgotten dreams, specifically on African Americans, while in “Buffalo Bill’s,” Cummings subtly addresses both the death of a man and how it signified the end of an era. When Cummings decided to use defunct rather than simply dead it illustrates that Buffalo Bill not only died but ceased to exist, along with the ideals he stood for. While Cummings’ work is overshadowed by a tone of hopeless sorrow Hughes’ language is more frustrated, and even angry. Both poems discuss American dreams and how they can easily be diverted or
But as time passed, people started to believe that slavery was unconstitutional. Debates were fought, muskets snapped, and cannons roared in order to secure the future of our country. After a war that separated the country for the first time in her short history, slavery was abolished; but laws and manuscript can only do so much. For the generations that were imprinted with this natural racism, it would take an equal amount of explanation and understanding to have any hope of a change in their mindset. Langston Hughes’s poem depicts this as the “Negro bearing slavery’s scars”, stating that no matter how much time has or will pass, the social and mental damage has already been done (20).
African Americans where fed up with the mistreatment they received in the south. The insulting wages they worked their whole lives for and the fear of dying or being tortured at any given moment for any given reason was devastating. In the Novel The Warmth of other suns by Isabel Wilkerson ties in with the novel Slavery by another name. The Warmth of other suns is like to continuation to the timeline begun in Slavery by another name. Even though The Warmth of other suns is based on the personal stories and lives of 3 people, it explains how African Americans had to do every thing possible to escape the south in search of newer and better lives.
Thesis for “A Black Man Talks of Reaping” Thesis statement: In the poem, “A Black Man Talks of Reaping,” Arna Bontemps, the author, uses negative diction to express the hardships of the African American race. Negative diction is word choice recounting a situation in an off-putting way. This way of portraying the suffering African Americans faced was used in the poem by the author. The man in this poem is in fear that the generations following will be faced with hardships due to being discriminated against just like he was. “I planted deep, within my heart the fear…” this partial sentence from the text helps to confirm the above statement.
He also makes loose references throughout the text that go unexplained. The plight he tells about is intended to leave readers pondering the magnitude of loss in identity, culture, and number of people when being brought over from Africa in stream-of-consciousness. These and other elements help to make this work a modernistic piece. The narrator describes the Middle Passage as a “voyage through death to life upon these shores.” He also says “sharks follow[ed] the moans, the fever, and the dying.” This gives readers the first indication of modernism. The voyage, in his personal view, was a journey of turmoil and hardships to get to American “shores,” and the ships that carried the slaves were a “festering hold” that harbored an entire people who were dying, ill, and “blacks [who were] rebellious.” “Some try to starve themselves… [some] leaped with crazy laughter to the waiting sharks.” The narrator’s depictions of the events taking place, like much of this story, are written in stream-of-consciousness, a major characteristic of modernism.
In the Cornel West article "Nihilism in Black America" he argues that the dilemma of African Americans is nihilism. This is somewhat parallel to W.E.B Dubois's Talented Tenth speech in 1903. Nihilism, according to West, is the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness. African Americans are threatened by the lack of hope and the “absence of meaning” in their lives. Dubois's philosophy not only shows nihilism in the black race during this era but it also shows the same lack of progression in the black community in 2011.
Societal change is also seen through Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. This speech stresses the urgent need for change through King’s repetitive phrase “One hundred years later...” King emphasises his scorn of the injustice and inequality that has persisted for too long: One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. The metaphor of ‘chains of discrimination’ creates a historical reminder of the slavery the Negroes have endured. King symbolises segregation and discrimination as an invisible manacle of change to provide a more concrete image of the issue in the reader’s mind. Change in this text, is shown as a powerful force when a society wants to improve their lives.
Though, it was taken too far when words began to hurt. In the piece, Countee Cullen’s, "Incident", the author expresses his opinions on racism and how a word or a phrase can stick with a human being and change their experience in life. Cullen demonstrates this situation by adding a word in his poem that changes the direction of the piece. By showing us this change, Cullen expresses his
The narrator’s dream at the end I believe symbolizes the American Dream as a fallacy. All are not equal and no matter how hard you work he has been taught that there are limitations for people of color and during this time could be considered for anybody that is not a white man. The narrator’s grandfather words play throughout as he is the representation of slavery and the ghosts of the
He created his own anti slavery paper called “The Liberator.” He used moral suasion to persuade reader that slavery was wrong. He also founded the American Antislavery Society. The Abolition movement was bound to end at sometime. Soon enough the south began to fight back. They argued that the north depended on the south for cotton and other supplies.