The short story “Thank You Ma’am” by Langston Hughes and “The Six Rows Of Pompons” by Toshio Mori have a common theme which is with a good leader leads to responsibility. In both of the stories the to people that teach the two younger kids in the story how to be more responsible. In “Thank You Ma’am” by Langston Hughes the main character Roger Gets taught respect. A quote that shows he got taught responsibility is “The boy wanted to say something else other than “Thank you, m’am” to Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, but he couldn’t do so as he turned at the barren stoop and looked back at the large woman in the door.…
In his work “Salvation”, Langston Hughes, as a young African-American child, decided to describe a life-changing experience that occurred in his beliefs. At the age of twelve years old, Hughes describes that he has come to the point in his life that gained him the opportunity of being “saved” by Jesus. Just like all the other children, he was expected to accept Jesus’ into his life, and by doing so, he would be saved. Therefore, when the time came, Langston was escorted to the front row, and placed with the other children that were ready to also be saved. As the ceremony started to commence, the children were greeted with sermons, prayers, and moans from the clergy.…
In “Salvation”, by Langston Hughes, the author addresses that some people pretend to believe in something to please others and fit in. Hughes recollects on his childhood of when he sat among a group of children that gathered awaiting salvation from Christ. Hughes learned from his aunt that meeting Jesus brings light to life and changes a person inwardly. So as he sat with the other children, he waited patiently for Jesus’s arrival. After the preacher gave his sermon, some children jumped for joy and others cried because they saw Jesus and became “saved”.…
The period of the civil rights movement was from 1954-1968. The civil rights movement was a movement to secure equal rights and opportunities for African Americans. When the book was released, it was in the midst of the civil rights movement. I believe that is why the book was so popular and became a best seller. Unintentionally, “To kill a mockingbird” was related to the civil rights movement.…
Innocence is frequently connected with youth and ignorance. However, the loss of one’s innocence is associated with the evils of the world. It can be interpreted in a variety of ways and it can happen numerous times. The loss of innocence sometimes involves what the society hold sacrosanct. In Harper Lee’s…
Langston Hughes provides insight on the race relations between Whites and Blacks during his lifetime, in the poems, "I, Too" and "Theme for English B", In "I, Too", Hughes mentions that he is "…the darker brother", referencing his darker skin compared to the rest of America, and how he is sent to the kitchen to eat when company comes over. He feels as if he is being pushed aside when asked to eat in the kitchen like a second-class citizen, but he does not get angry. Instead of letting those feelings fester inside of him he uses the time being pushed away to expand his mind, to prove his worth to the rest of America. He follows this up by saying that "Tomorrow, I'll be at the table when company comes", showing his optimism for the future and…
Throughout Hughes’ poem is the symbol of black and white. These two colors both represent the color of skin of the speaker and of his classmates, as well as the color of the page he is writing on. In the beginning of the poem, colored is just a word, however, taken in context, it has a very negative connotation because of how it was used to describe people of African-American descent. When the speaker talks about the color of the page, he 's questions whether his paper will be different because it is written by a person of color. Even though the paper is white, when he writes on it with ink, there will be black on it as well.…
In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the theme is how racial discrimination happened in daily life around that era and how sometimes it still happens today. Many white southerners treated African American people like they were animals and never got the same treatment as white people because of their skin color. “There are one kind of folks, folks” (Lee 304). That statement represents the inequality that happened in that era that still happens in some ways today.…
The poem written by Hughes says, “ Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore—And then run?”. The author explains that their dream of freedom was drying up like a raisin because of all the injustices during that times. In this poem, the whole point is that the reader notice that they are tired of watching people of their race being killed by nonsense excuses and that their dream was slowly dying because nobody had enough courage to stop the officials and tell them that they had rights too. While a famous speech explains this problem with a hopeful point of view making the listener be more optimistic with the material.…
Frederick Douglass employs three very important themes in his autobiography, all of which are effective at gaining the reader’s sympathy. One theme is his point that slavery is an impersonal system of dehumanization, in which slaves are treated like animals, plants, or even inanimate objects, but never like humans. He also shows how slavery corrupts the church and the legal system. White men are never subject to any legal ramifications if they hurt or even kill slaves. To help illustrate these themes, Douglass brings special attention to the slaves’ songs.…
The truth can be a hard thing to come by when you are dealing with any type of person. In “Theme for English B,” by Langston Hughes, the topic of truth is what lays the foundation down for his poem. Hughes is most likely the speaker in this poem giving the view of an entire group, which would be the colored student population. The poem starts off by sharing an assignment the instructor gave the speaker for their class. The instructor informs the class that if they let their literary work come out off them than it will be true.…
Fifty years ago, on April 18, 1946, Jackie Robinson broke organized baseball's color barrier with a characteristic bang, homing and scoring four runs in a historic first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers' top farm team. In Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible wanted to show a version of McCarthyism. McCarthyism the is the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism . But instead of seeing people that have been accused of treason or crimes against the government in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible the reader sees people being accused of witchcraft. Which ultimately leading to people abusing the power that they have for selfish a people abusing the power that…
One of the most powerful lines in the poem, it tells how the black community lives on their dream of one day being treated as equal to whites. Even though the black community deals with racism everyday,…
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare are classified as a fiction books. However, they reveal many truths about the human condition when it comes to prejudice and racism. In TKAM, we saw how racism took a life of an innocent Tom Robinson as a disease, and how prejudice about Boo Radley spread out in Maycomb. In the MOV we witnessed the religious prejudice (Christian vs. Shylock), and the racism against the Prince of Morocco with black skin. There is a connection to the real world, when some people see a Muslim person – they think about terrorism, not about how good this person can be.…
On the day of Hughes’ graduation from high school he got a train across the Mississippi. On this journey he reflected upon the significance of the Mississippi river and how it created a bond between him and his African ancestors. The result of this was a poem called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”. It conveys how Langston Hughes felt that rivers spiritually connected him to his ancestors that sailed the Nile, Euphrates and the Mississippi. There is a significant racial influence on Langston Hughes’ work.…