Jim Henson

“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” said Lyndon Baynes Johnson, the 36th President of the United States, in a speech at Washington, D.C. ("The Voting Rights Act of 1965"). Ever since the adoption of the 15th Amendment in 1870, African Americans have been denied their constitutional right to vote, despite federal policies. This discrimination was…

Oftentimes, the best way to appreciate a culture or a tradition is to portray it in the most realistic way possible. In the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston writes about the journey of a woman who is trying to find herself in the world. Since the book has been published, it has received criticism for portraying African Americans and their traditions in an unfavorable way. Although it seems that Zora Neale Hurston oversimplifies the lives of African Americans in Their Eyes…

A famous Harlem Renaissance poet by the name of Claude McKay once described African Americans as “despised, oppressed, enslaved and lynched, denied a human place in the great life line of the Christian West” (McKay). While McKay was correct in saying that African Americans during the post-Reconstruction era of the 1880s to the 1930s experienced discrimination, their social standing still increased significantly. After the abolishment of slavery, African Americans anticipated social growth and a…

The Union League was a group created for the benefit and advancement of the rights of freedmen. The Union League consisted mainly of African American freedmen, with representative which were either black or white. The Union League is debated on how effective it actually was. The Union League in my opinion was effective in integrating African Americans into the American society, however not effective for its intended purpose which was to protect the rights of equality for freedmen. The Union…

The Help, released in 2011 and directed by Tate Taylor is a film which follows the story of a southern author Skeeter as she writes a book detailing the life of African American women, as they work as maids. The film is constructed to represents the perspective that African American women are being treated with inequality and discrimination while working as maids for white households. This perspective is constructed through the construction of setting, as the film is set in Jackson Mississippi…

Racial tensions in the south were stronger than ever due to the brown v board of education court case stating that segregated school was unconstitutional(the belief of white supremacy). The south reacted to the brown v board of education case through massive resistance where they allowed no whites to attend integrated schools, forced school boards to assign blacks and whites to different schools, and closed down schools to turn them private to whites.(Doc W)During the 1950s blacks were oppressed…

The first people to immigrate to America had come in search of some type of freedom, whether it was freedom of speech, freedom from an oppressive government, freedom to practice a religion openly, or even just freedom to own more land. These first immigrants in North America proclaimed they wanted freedom for all and that all people are created equal, which was the basis America was founded on. However, only time would tell what it truly meant to say that all people are equal. Before long,…

It is readily apparent that Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God works as a vanguard text in the pronunciation of equal rights for both women and African Americans. The manner in which this text presents these ideas is well documents. What has been less discussed in the manner in which Hurston presents this idea by means of replicating historical trauma and reorientation of personhood, thereby displacing women, not only as the new slave but as subhuman in order to call upon the…

Equality is something that is viewed as one of the main foundations that America was built on, yet it also is one of the core struggles that the U.S. has had to deal with over time. It was easy, for example, to vote to give African Americans the right to vote, but it was not easy to change the minds of the people that opposed them having the right to vote, and get them to treat African Americans as equals. Equality is the ability to have every person treated as an equal, for every person to have…

My research was mainly focused on police brutality and racism against African Americans. The key findings in my annotated bibliography were, (1) African Americans who have not violated any traffic laws are stopped and frisked by the police, (2) African Americans are ticketed by police more than whites, (3) African Americans are often handcuffed and humiliated by the police compared to others (4) In general African Americans have the fear of police at all times while driving, (5) African…