In Eudora Welty’s short story “A Worn Path,” the main character, Phoenix Jackson, is subconsciously and consciously always reminded of her blackness, and her identification as other. Throughout this story, the author constantly alludes to the black and dark objects, people, and animals Phoenix encounters on her journey. First, she is described by the author as being an “old Negro. p270” and having a “black freckled hand. p271” These characteristics seem to define who she is as an individual.
The book was written during the 1950’s in America, and coincided with the civil rights movement. At this time, racism was still evident in society and this is a key theme of this text. In the book Maycomb is a small town within Alabama itself and is a microcosm of American society during the 1930’s; although we do not hear anything about the rest of Alabama or America throughout the entire novel we feel it in there within the values of Maycomb. During the first description of the town in chapter one, Harper Lee makes gives Maycomb a very negative atmosphere. She repeats the adjective old, which emphasises how dull it is.
Pearl, not White, Black, or Feminine Just a Gem In Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), Anne Moody portrays in her story that racist ideology is more complex than just whites hating blacks. Finding herself in jail for simply holding a peaceful march, Moody says, “I imagined myself in Nazi Germany” rather than Mississippi, a state in American, the land of the free (Moody 307). Now Melinda Haynes’ Mother of Pearl (1999) takes that ideology a step further by conveying identity and gender stereotypes into newly acceptable social roles with the redefining of white, black, working class, middle class, female and male identities in a harsh southern culture. Haynes set her story in a small southern town of Petal, Mississippi, in 1956. Her novel reads like a fairy tale where discrimination and violence were mild while freedoms and acceptance is open to all.
This work gives a great view of life in America after the Civil War, when our country was under reconstruction and was going thru a significant part of our history. Kings work shows a strong sense of following the realism movement, and she exemplifies what it is to be a black person in America in the 19th century by showing how life was for African American citizens. King keeps the structure of her short story on the guidelines of realism by keeping a strong emphasis on verisimilitude. She keeps a faithful representation of the real world and shows us true American lifestyles of the 19th century. In the 19th century and even before that it was very common for people to use rivers as means of transportation.
Race Relations after the Civil War 3 The way white Southerners made it difficult on former slaves in the South was to create what was called “Black Codes”. These codes were laws made by southern states to try to ensure their way of life could not be infringed on in the wake of the passing of the 13th amendment which outlawed slavery. Examples of such codes varied from state to state. However, the message was clear to the former slaves that they were still unequal. Examples of these laws are as follows: 1.
To Kill A Mockingbird Analysis Social commentary is one of the driving forces of fiction writers. All have opinions of the society from in which they were reared causing many of their story driving characters to come from similar situations. One southern born woman, Harper Lee, followed this formula when writing her staunchly moral yet surprisingly youthful novel To Kill a Mockingbird. To Kill A Mockingbird is set in Alabama before civil rights cases flooded the benches of justices and cases against African-Americans were considered open and closed. Through To Kill A Mockingbird, the reader puts on the shoes of a little girl, Scout, and traipses through this familiar town and learns of social injustice by seeing it affect not only a member of the town, but her own father.
Even his most sympathetic white characters found it completely natural to regard blacks differently, for the racist preconceptions were everywhere and they permeated and changed the thinking of everyone in their path. Twain best demonstrated this theme through the interactions of others with his main black character, Jim. Jim was a slave owned by the widow who cared for Huck during the first part of the book. The widow was apparently a kind mistress and promised Jim that she would never sell him to the slave traders in New Orleans. However Jim overheard her one night saying that she planned do to just that, which is what prompted him to run away early on (Twain at 43).
Many writers of twentieth century African American Literature committed themselves to accurately capture regional dialects in order to preserve habits of speech and create the effect of authenticity in their novels (American Passages, 2003). Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the pre-eminent authors of the genre. Her book Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a ‘speech-recording’ novel that takes into account local dialect of African American culture. Numerous deviations from standard conventions of English language use are registered in the book. For instance, at the level of phonology: b’lieve (believe – Standard English), Ah’m (I’m), tuh (to), dat (that), de (the), and contractions such as standin’ or tryin’.
They simply did house work. Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan woman. It was looked down upon for her to be writing poems. Phillis Wheatley was an African slave who also should have been working on household chores, not writing poetry. Even though there was 150 years of separation between the two women poets, they were able to overcome any problems publishing their poems due to their gender or race.
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y. Davis Undoubtedly, Angela Davis epitomizes what millions of African American men and women have long felt about the never ending oppressed conditions that exist for them in America. Davis, one of the founding mothers of the radical 60’s and 70’s black feminist and civil rights movement, usher into the 20th century a buried and overlooked oppression that many black woman experienced at the end of racial slavery that cannot continue to go unnoticed. In her book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, Davis attempts to breakdown the wall barriers of gender oppression by examining the sexuality and lyrics of three iconic women of the blues; challenging the “mainstream ideological assumptions regarding women being in love… and the notion that women’s place was in the domestic sphere” Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (pg.11). But before discussing the works of Angela Y. Davis it would be injustice not to discuss the woman, herself, and the many accomplishments as-well-as trials and tribulation she has overcome. Angela Davis was born January 6, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama to two highly educated parents, both of whom where educators themselves.