The Unescapable Stereotype: A Summary Erich Nunn’s essay “Screening the Twenty-First-Century South” stresses issues in the South in the Twenty-First-Century. He focuses on how commodified “well worn,” as nunn states, stereotyped versions of Southern residents are glorified and laughed at throughout media. The media portrays the South as such to cover up the actual issues the South is facing. He digs deep into popular TV shows that do so, such as Duck Dynasty, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, and True Detective.…
Arc of Justice Analysis The amounts of themes that can be taken from this terrific book are abundant. The story makes the reader really feel and understand the struggles that the African American people faced during the 1920’s. The Sweet family is faced with the fear of riots attacking their new house in a white community.…
Redlinning, bad mortages, racial steering and failed school policies led to a “northern version of Jim Crow”( 1). Because she uses the idea of Jim Crow, Moore directly links intentional south segregation to the north, generally associated with the idea of freedom. The very idea of Jim Crow conveys a strict and intentional segregation between blacks and whites through passed laws. Moore is arguing that institutions within Chicago used means to segregate neighborhoods other than laws.…
Ames’s platform, supporting the rights of African Americans, caused much chaos in the southern states. Mississippi especially resented Ames and his carpetbagger ways. Lemann describes just how much Mississippi resented Ames, “At a July 4th celebration held by Negro Republicans in Vicksburg, whose population of eleven thousand made it Mississippi’s largest city, a group of whites with guns turned up and started shooting” (71). This tragic event is just one example of the violence that occurred throughout this narrative. Peter Crosby, Vicksburg’s sheriff, sent a letter to President Grant concerning the matter.…
While traveling on a train to attend a University in Atlanta, he met a bright young fellow who was a student (Johnson, 1989, p. 16). Meanwhile, while walking into a street, The Ex-Colored Man spied a large group of colored people (Johnson, 1989, p. 16). The Ex-Colored Man assumed that the colored people from Atlanta lived on a particular street (Johnson, 1989, p. 17). Despite The Ex-Colored Man wanting to have an insight about Blacks in America, he chooses to talk disparagingly about blacks. He states, the unkempt appearance, the shambling, slouching gait and loud talk and laughter of these people aroused in me a feeling of almost repulsion (Johnson, 1989, p. 17).…
The American South encapsulated some of the most influential African American writers of the time. These writers were able to connect with others through their writings about pain, faith, struggle, and hope for a life with more camaraderie. Known for perpetuating the cruelest acts of violence toward slaves, the South was a place that a colored individual was known to avoid. Although the South was not just considered the site of brutality, it was considered the birthplace of African-American cultural practices and now a place for hope and change. In this essay I will discuss and analyze the works of Frederick Douglass, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston and their outlook of the American South.…
Margo Jefferson’s Negroland: A Memoir, was written to provide a unique perspective on the upper class African-American community. Jefferson names this group of people “Negroland,” and explores how her childhood and the historical presence of this elite African-American society has shaped her as an adult. The memoir is divided into five major sections that discuss Negroland in America, Jefferson’s childhood, her struggle with depression, her adult life, and feminism-the focus of Jefferson’s later years.…
“All my life I’ve been sick and tired,” she shakes her head, “Now I 'm sick and tired of being sick and tired.” These words of a famous black woman named Fannie Lou Hamer, came from a deep place of impassioned plea. A plea for a “change in the system that exploits the Delta Negroes,” as evidenced by Hamer’s text. In these five texts, the main ideas were advancements for changes in society, education, and in voting, but mainly, just equality for all races. As the reader can tell, not only by this quote but by all five texts, African American’s had a very hard time in the early 1900’s with being mistreated by Caucasians, so as a result, it led several African Americans to rebel against society 's rules, trying to break free, and gain freedom…
Leon Litwack, an American historian, uses the personal testimonies and memories of black Southerners in his book Trouble in Mind, in order to describe the terrible injustices they faced regularly in the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow South. Litwack pulls no punches when describing what everyday life was like for Southern African Americans between the 1870s and the Great Depression. Though this book is not a chronological telling of segregation, the author guides the audience through the horrifying and ever-pervasive ways in which African Americans were taught and trained to respect and submit to the existing social order across the South. Litwack utilizes individual stories, memories, and a variety of other sources to convey the day-to-day workings…
In the 21st century, during a time of racial tension in America, Ta-Nehisi, African American author and father, wrote “ Letter to Son,” a story about the racial injustices and corrupt government system built to tyrannize and destroy the black community. Coates claims that the oppression against African Americans continues to happen in today’s society because of the principles of slavery that the United States of America was built on. He supports his claim by helping the reader to draw the connection between the abuse of the black body and current issues in today’s society like police brutality, white superiority , and the unfair treatment of the black minority. He goes on to describe how white america has made it its job to keep all people especially african americans believing they are inferior to and less than the white man whether that being through the breaking down the black man subconsciously or physically. In the text,…
Laura Wexler the author of “Fire in a Canebrake” gives a very detailed nonfictional narrative of an event which is proclaimed to be the last mass lynching in American history. Wexler shines some light on the part of American history that isn’t talked about as much, the Civil Rights era. The author captivates the thin line of racial tension as well as racial ignorance that can be felt throughout everyday life in most rural cities in the south. The book takes place in Monroe, Georgia, a rural city that is roughly forty miles east of Atlanta. The city of Monroe from what Wexler has written is no different than any other rural town in America in 1946.…
Tom Robinson, an African-American man, who was represented as a “Mockingbird” in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, was wrongly accused of raping a white woman. After he went on a trail filled with unfair juries and lost the case, he was sentenced to jail, but was then brutally murdered by some guards. Based on this storyline, the main theme is social injustice, the moral unfairness in a society of colored citizens and other minorities, which is mentioned the greatest and gradually developed throughout the book.…
Hortense Powdermaker’s book, Stranger and Friend, chronicles her experiences doing fieldwork throughout her career. In it, she discusses culture as shared meaning, where context and history give different components of a society social value. Through this process, essential qualities of a culture develop. The theory with which Powdermaker views culture, cultural essentialism, is one which uses these essential qualities as means of identification to form groups of people. This differs from Malinowski’s functionalist view, which claims that culture serves the needs of individuals rather than of larger communities.…
Benjamin Banneker, a self-educated free African American wrote a letter to the then Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson. Throughout Benjamin Banneker’s letter to Thomas Jefferson, he advocates for people of African descent who does not have liberty. Banneker presents his case in the letter with the fact that even though both him and Thomas Jefferson have some form of liberty, his liberty is barely allowed because of the “prejudice and prepossession” of people of his complexion (“To Thomas Jefferson” 2017). They do not have the same kind of liberty seeing as Banneker, as a free man, liberty and freedom comes with limitations and how African American slaves do not have freedom at all. Banneker then tells Jefferson that he does not need to prove that African Americans are treated bad.…
Maycomb County, the setting of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, has a deeply ingrained culture of racism over reason. Tom Robinson’s death was unjust, yet few mourned and the eventual death did not shock anyone. The reason for this tragedy is that Tom was too confident that people would show good morals when faced with a complicated decision. He made a series of poor choices that placed him in a difficult situation that even the best lawyer could not get him out of. Although Tom was framed, it was his own mistakes that enabled Bob Ewell to prosecute him in the first place.…