After Rosa Parks Analysis

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Ben Davis, 2008 Freedom from oppression, or lack thereof, is seldom far from the American public conscience. By taking on this issue on a massive scale, The Civil Rights movement has left an especially formidable legacy. By way of national institutions such as Black History Month, Modern Americans have studied the movement's images and rhetoric at a grade school level for at least twenty years. Civil Rights legislation gave a platform for the sidelined American black of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to become, at last, an public entity that could hypothetically participate in American life as advertised. Furthermore, a generation of political pushes for equality and tolerance followed the Civil Rights Movement, many of which may claim lasting successes. In After Rosa Parks, Janet Desaulniers explores the relationship between characters making their way within and without a society that may not have absorbed the lessons of the this generation. Ellie, Frank, and Cody struggle to deal with suffocating surroundings, where freedom seems, at best, elusive, and at worst, destructive. Their struggles are compounded by forces beyond human control, and Ellie, especially, must come to terms with her limited ability to raise Cody without interference. To the extent she accomplishes this,…show more content…
Essential to Rosa Parks' success was Frank's guiding philosophy, in the form that he imparts it to Cody: "Just don't go... stay home," (143). Whether Cody picks his battles wisely in the future, or, like his uncle, adopts a self-defeating doctrine, will determine how and whether he over overcomes the challenges waiting for him at school. A great deal of this hinges on Ellie, but her brother's gift is not lost on her. Though Frank's personal boycott was not successful, through Cody he leaves behind a legacy of virtue and
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