Essay On African American Experience

You don’t realize the importance of freedom, until it is stripped away from you. The very idea of being constrained and your desires being halted is in complete opposition with human nature. If you asked someone what it means to be free, you would likely get an answer citing the ability to do as one pleases. However, analyzing the African- American experience, the idea of freedom become increasing complex. It often seems that with each law instilled to ensure our freedom, another obstacle appears to deny it. Within the context of the Constitution of the U.S. freedom and citizenship are intertwined: two parts of a whole ensuring a free life for all those deemed as Americans. The denial of these attributes of the American experience, raises the question of what it truly means to have citizenship and be free. The articles Havana Up in Harlem & E. Franklin Frazier’s Revenge discusses these discrepancies and offers new, insightful ideas regarding these two complex topics. The readings attempt to expand our common understandings of the meaning of citizenship and freedom by displaying the discrepancies between the written law of the land and the realities of the African-American experience. While also, …show more content…
Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the termination of the Jim Crow era all point toward the conclusion that blacks and equality had won, while racists and inequality had lost. This is the context in which the movement is taught and overwhelmingly revered. However, this context is not the sole way to analyze the Civil Rights Movement. If you alter or add on to MLK’s definition of freedom, then maybe the African-American didn’t become free during the 1960’s. Despite the legal rights given to us, from a different perspective, we are still not citizens of the United Sates. These alternative perspectives are what will be discussed throughout this