Ken Burns a renowned documentary film maker uses his years of research and scholarship to give viewers an unbiased version of history through the use of his various primary sources stated throughout him. He discusses the current problems that America is facing today on the issues of race in the following two videos: “Charleston Shooting a Chance to Reexamine History”, and “150 years after the Civil War, America is Not Post Racial”. Despite these videos appearing to be on entirely different issues to the American public, Ken Burns brings up the argument in both videos, of Americas’ continual issues with race and misinterpretations of history since the Civil War era. The first video, “Charleston Shooting a Chance to Reexamine History”, brings…
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.…
This essay discusses the correlation of themes and topics from Dr. Dwayne Mack’s book Black Spokane and connects it to key aspects and themes from Let Nobody Turn Us Around, and from African Americans: A Concise History. All three texts encompasses important aspects of African American oppression, the fight for civil and equal rights. During the time of slavery, many blacks were treated horribly and were not treated equally to whites. Many white Americans’ embraced American ethnologist study which stated that white Americans were a superior race and that African Americans are a lesser race (Hine, p. 190).…
This play is important to both black and white audiences because this story can each teach us many lessons, including the strength a family poses, that all families reach ups and downs, and how we each are very similar and have…
In the 1950s and 1960s civil rights in the United States was a long talked about topic from the everyday American to our Presidents. In the 1960s two of our Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B, Johnson, deliver speeches on civil rights. Both Kennedy and Johnson are effective in their speeches using their credibility as Presidents to back up the statistical and logical evidence they both use. But Kennedy is more effective in delivering his speech because he uses everyday situations to appeal to the audience’s emotion. He also shows his character by presenting himself as “one of the people” throughout his speech.…
America blossomed in the 1950’s. The economy was booming; household gadgets, like refrigerators, were becoming more widely available, and suburbs developed, separating people from the chaos of a city and creating a small-town environment. As the middle class of the suburbs expanded, however, so did the widening division between the white and black opportunities. Blacks were left without the prospects whites had to improve their lives. This inequality created tension within the black community as some searched for any outlet to gain control over their lives.…
The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a bitter and bloody Civil War fought over one underlying factor: slavery. Though many, including President Abraham Lincoln himself, claimed this war was to ‘protect the union’, the south clearly wanted slaves, and opposed anyone who could take their slaves away. To all, this contention for slavery brought up questions as to what American liberty and freedom really meant in relation to African Americans, questions that yielded an incredibly wide array of answers within the country. What caused this array of answers differed with the race, sex, socioeconomic demographic that Americans were a part of. These perspectives on liberty and freedom in relation to African Americans, though different because…
Taylor discusses the tensions between the old guard and the new generation. The black youth who were very much involved in the protests and marches for Brown and Ferguson, were blamed for the violence that had been the central theme on social media. Rev. Al Sharpton, declared himself as “the new national face of the civil rights establishment” (159). He arrived to Ferguson only after “young Black people had already endured two standoffs with police that had ended with tear gas and rubber bullets” (159). Sharpton wanted to stage-manage the Black Lives Matter Movement and take leadership after the Black youth has done all the “hard work”.…
all the questions of race relations, and of stereotyping. That was the farthest from minds. Again, what we were trying to do was to present an amusing set of characters in as amusing a background as we possibly could, doing amusing things, to entice that audience to come back next week. (Turner, 1994) Henry Gates expressed in documentary, Color Adjustment,” When we think of this group of people whose historical experience had been transformed by the war (World War II), poised for full integration into the American society, and then we think about, what they were greeted with, as television made its debut. They were greeted with images of fully autonomous, segregated, separate black communities, which was the community in which Amos ‘n’ Andy…
Sky Marshall UNIV-1002 Professor Calivas 4/6/16 Rosenwald After taking my seat among many other viewers and being given a brief overview of the importance of kindness and compassion in everyday life (especially in today’s society), the lights fade to darkness and the film begins to roll. “Rosenwald” begins by focusing on a mystifying anomaly. One that, during a time where prejudice ran rampant throughout the whole of the American South and a harsh line was, by many, drawn between Black and White Americans, was found in the most unusual of places.…
An Ever Changing Country Although it has been decades since slavery ended, racism is still a profound controversy in the United States today. Charles Blow describes some of these levels of racism and its effects on people in the United States in his article “White America’s ‘Broken Heart’”. The article, as can be deciphered by the title, is about how white Americans today are handling the changing situations of equality in the United States. Blow published this article February 4, 2016, on The New York Times’ Opinion Pages on their website. Many Americans assume that racism is almost completely gone in today’s society, but Blow believes that it still lingers and is affecting the health of Caucasians in America.…
In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Killing an innocent person like Tom Robinson for getting blamed for raping Mayella Ewell, this was a false statement. In the movie The Butler. Cecil Gaines life was mostly racism and unfair. He was treated not right throughout his life. Harper Lee's, To Kill a Mockingbird explores the issues which were racism all over the town Maycomb in 1930’s.…
Alfred M. Green’s influential speech attempts to persuade his fellow African Americans to join the efforts of the Union during the Civil War. Even though the participation of African Americans in the war was unheard of, Green stresses the importance of uniting African Americans by beginning with parallelism and a metaphor, transitions to a cumulative sentence and emotional appeal, and ends with a metaphor and emotional appeal, thus relaying the main theme of slavery abolition. Green introduces tremendous patriotism and gratitude to the United States, with the assistance of parallelism and a metaphor. Green commences his speech with, “of a race in…of freedom, and of civil and religious toleration.”…
In 1965, James Baldwin faced William F. Buckley in a debate at the Cambridge Union Society in Cambridge University. The topic of the discussion was whether “the American Dream [was] achieved at the expense of the American Negro.” The African American Civil Rights Movement occurred at this time and Martin Luther King Jr. recently led a demonstration in Selma, Alabama. Understanding that the debate took place at the same time of the Civil Rights Movement adds more weight to the discussion as the matter of black rights was a pressing concern. was a pressing concern for the rights of the black community.…
She repeats that "[a]s servants, we are respected, but let us presume to aspire any higher, our employer regards us no longer," thus wasting the talents of African Americans and preventing them from voicing their ability to change and influence the world around them. The emotional tone and figurative language presented appeals to ethos and enables the audience to feel and see what Stewart herself experiences. In the face of discrimination and arbitrary treatment, we must remind ourselves to stand our ground and fight for what we believe. In doing so, we must remind ourselves to appeal to a wide variety of persuasive approaches and consider the logic, emotions, and ethics of our audience. Stewart manipulates the three rhetorical strategies carefully, acknowledging the flaws of both her own argument and the claims offered the Liberator and the whites of her time while connecting her own emotional desires and thoughts to the audience and briefly ensuring her own credibility and integrity through the American…