| Comparison Essay | Brandon Simmons | October 10, 2012 | The purpose of this essay is to compare “The Library Card” written by Richard Wright and “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self” written by Alice Walker. These essays were written by two African American authors. Wright was born in 1908 and Walker was born in 1944. They grew up in the south during the times when America was segregated and African Americans were not free to do whatever they wanted to. Many of their stories were written about the struggles of blacks.
He does this by providing the stories of four individuals who lived in different places in the South under very different circumstances the year the Civil War ended. These stories are recreated by using the personal memoirs and diaries written by the people themselves, which creates a very authentic retelling of the lives of these people in 1865. For men and women living in this time period, America was changing all around them politically, not just because of the end of slavery but also because of the after effects of a civil war. The theme of the book is like that
Further embedding these ideas in John’s mind was his experience as a young teen witnessing the brutality of another young man – a slave – being beaten mercilessly by his owner. While living in Ohio, the Brown family harbored escaped slaves on several occasions. This was also around the time when the United States saw the first vestiges of its slow creep toward civil war with the Missouri Compromise in 1820, the publication of Garrison’s “The Liberator” in 1831, and Nat Turner’s revolt that same year. Frederick Douglass published his narrative in 1845, more compromises were made between the North and South as newly acquired territories were gained after the Mexican War several years later, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” further outraged abolitionists. In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act finally brought things to a boil between proponents and opponents of slavery, and John
During the early 1900’s the mistreatment of African-American people was very prominent. They were oppressed and needed Activists. Activists who could aid and guide the civil rights for African-American. James Howard Meredith was one of those people. Born in Mississippi on June 25, 1933(Wikipedia) He was raised on a farm and shortly after he finished high school he joined the military.
Slavery has been a part of our history for hundreds of years. Eventually abolitionist movements helped outlaw slavery, but still today it is a controversial topic in society. Gary Collison, who is a Caucasian English professor at Pennsylvania State University, wrote the novel Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen. He wrote this book to voice the truth about hardships of slavery and discrimination. Collison follows Minkins throughout the continent as he is a slave in Norfolk, VA, a fugitive in Boston, and a free black man in Montreal.
Racism is a means to an end, as oppressors employ racist measures in order to achieve power over another group. Wright shows numerous times throughout the novel that racism breeds irrational actions, and points out many times when Southern whites abuse blacks for no reason other than to vent their own frustration. This abuse and subordination of blacks also serves an economic function for the whites, as the blacks are the basic laborers who almost single-handedly support the white economy, for meager pay. Whites abuse blacks in order to keep them in a position where their service would empower
Biography The collective experience with which Lawrence identified was one of nearly four centuries of slavery, oppression, discrimination and exploitation. No one might be better positioned to understand the contradiction at the heart of American society, the hypocrisy of its proclaimed ethos of freedom, equality and “justice for all” than a black American. Modernist painter and educator Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was born in 1917 as Jacob Armstead Lawrence in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He began his art studies at the Utopia Children’s Center in New York City’s Harlem district where he studied under the painter Charles Alston. Lawrence dropped out of high school at the age of sixteen to continue his art instruction with Alston but this time at the Harlem Art Workshop where he met several artists associated with the
After the civil war ended, the United States of America was still being exposed to vast amounts of racism, while people continued to fight for equal rights and freedom. Slavery was officially over in 1865, but there was still no equality for the blacks. In place of having the Negroes enslaved, the former white slave owners and racists alike would instead continue to oppress them by further segregation and assault, while the white authorities turned a blind eye because they were often part of the problem. In society, they were viewed as second-class citizens; forced to use segregated areas of washrooms, entrances, restaurants, public transit, and recreational facilities; such as churches. It took nearly one hundred years for the black population
Birmingham, Alabama was one of the most tightly segregated cities at the time (“Alabama”). There were racial segregation laws called Jim Crow Laws enacted between 1876-1965. They separated black and white schools, forbade interracial marriages, and had restaurants and stores that only accepted white citizens. They also had separate hospitals, parks, army troops, and African Americans couldn’t even walk on the same sidewalks as the white people (“Racism in the 1930s”). Not soon after, trains and buses started reserving seats for white citizens forcing blacks to
The Civil Rights movement changed our society especially for African Americans, until the 14th amendment by Abraham Lincoln in 1868, African Americans had been struggling for equality in our nation. From 1945-1974 they were held by bounds of segregation, unable to go to the same schools, eat at the same places, and or drink from the same fountains as everyne else. The Brown vs the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas is the turning point for segregation in the school systems. Brown had claimed that African Americans did not receive the same equal opportunities that whites did concerning their education. Some examples where children had to walk several miles to reach their “black school” and the white school was a few blocks away.