Back in the 1800s and 1900s, the African Americans were considered a lower class race, and treated as such. Many of these people, as well as others who found this unfair, fought for the equal rights to freedom and success for the African Americans. Peaceful protesting was a huge way that people thought would help achieve the equality that was being fought for. One way that people fought peacefully was in writing, commonly poetry, and the poetic devices the authors used. The two poems "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar and "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou show similarities in their themes of African American struggles to success during this time period which is shown through the symbols, imagery, and how the titles defy the readers expectations of the poem. Through the symbols in each poem, the struggles that African Americans had to go through in order to achieve success (while going through hardships of being African American in that time and having others say they could not achieve success) are conveyed. One example of this in "Sympathy" is when the author compares the "caged bird" (Dunbar l. 1) to the bigger picture of how African Americans feel in this time period. He relates the first stanza to African Americans watching the outside world of success, promises, and greatness from inside a metaphorical cage- as though stating the African Americans cannot reach this, but only watch the gloriousness from inside this 'cage.' In the third stanza, Dunbar writes, "When
