This chapter, in its broadest terms, is an analysis of the Kansas City black community known as “Leeds”. Kremer breaks down the town; it’s social norms, demographics, schooling, occupations etc. Through this, he hopes to prove that “Missouri witnessed creative and energetic efforts by African Americans to achieve dignity and autonomy in the face of racial oppression during the so-called Jim Crow era.” This is very similar to the article we read on Pennytown; he is using Leeds as a case study for black success, in a time where society had stacked the deck against them. As the title would suggest, Kremer has a very positive view of Leeds. He quotes that in Leeds, “boys learned to be men”. He describes the community as “a large, close family”, where “everybody loved everybody. In short, his goal is the depict Leeds as a model of black ingenuity, generosity, and love in Missouri.
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Questions like “what attracted you to the area?”, and “what were the houses like”, give you a nice picture of what moving to Leeds was like. He goes on to ask them how they tended to their gardens, their hunting habits, and questions about the community atmosphere of Leeds. Eventually he digs into what it was like to attend school and go to work in Kansas City, if you were from Leeds. Those questions in particular yielded some interesting stories. For example, how some Leeds children would change their shoes once they got to school, so that students wouldn’t be able to see the dust on their shoes, and thus know they were from Leeds. I would have asked a few more questions regarding their relationship with white people in Kansas City, particularly the people who sold them their houses, perhaps to find out if they were treated fairly. But in general, Kremer does a good job of asking interesting, informative questions in this
He concludes his narrative with an epilogue eloquently titled “Up, You Mighty Race”. In the first part, Hahn introduces readers to the late antebellum period that was characterized by strong family values, formation of communication based networks and leadership roles. Chapter one focuses on the mobilization of communities and the role slavery played in the formation of familial ties. Slaves begin to become aware of politics. The following chapters uncover politic relations during the Civil War and after the Emancipation Proclamation.
This book changed how I think about the ghetto in general and sparks my interest in the change that has taken place over time. Duneier does a great job of changing the way we view the ghetto’s middle class throughout the insight that is apparent through his research. The ghetto and its civilians have completely changed over the years, resulting in a split between the old and the new. The book's sociological insights effect the way you think about this area and black urban males in general. Such insights such as wrongful stereotypes exist due to our society's perceptions of this social class.
He says that his father’s way of handling African Americans was a way of the past and that people didn't do that anymore. This gives the views of the generation, and how they often viewed racism towards African Americans. All these views from white citizens give the reader a second side to see and a way to understand how people felt about the racial tensions of that time and what contributed to
He wrote this piece to express his important opinion about the effect of racism and how he’s viewed as a man of color. He talks about his first encounter of racism when he was young man in college and was assumed to be a mugger or killer just because of skin. “It was in echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into the ability to alter public space in ugly ways.” I feel that the author is trying to connect to his vast audience of people who don’t understand what it is like to a black man in society. Later he contemplated that he rejected or shunned by the white race collectively as a dangerous man.
“In the early summer of 1960, there began a rumor among the children of Betsy Ann’s age that the railroad people were planning to take all the land around Myrtle Street” (Jones 15). The early 60s was a very unsettled period when the African-American Civil Rights Movement was at its peak. Betsy Ann lived in a small, tight-knit neighborhood in Washington, D.C. where everyone knew one another and was aware of everything that was happening around them. “To the west, … was the high school Gonzaga, where white boys were taught by white priests. When the colored people and their homes were gone, the wall and the tracks remained, and so did the highschool, with the same boys and the same priests” (11-12).
But after a while of James being surrounded by black kids and their parents, because he lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, he began to notice how his mother stood out among the others. “I began to notice something about my mother, that she looked nothing like the other kids’ mothers… I noticed that Mommy stood apart from the other mothers, rarely speaking to them… She’d quickly grasp my hand as I stepped off the bus, ignoring the stares of the black women as she whisked me away. One afternoon as we walked home from the bus stop, I asked Mommy why she didn’t look like the other mothers.” (McBride, 21).
He sees African American youths finding the points of confinement put on them by a supremacist society at the exact instant when they are finding their capacities. The narrator talks about his association with his more youthful sibling, Sonny. That relationship has traveled
Throughout Ellison’s narrative he addresses times when discrimination occurred and his mother had the courage to stand up to it. By telling the story through the eyes of a young child, he conveys a sense of innocence of a person being born into this institution of discrimination never having done anything to deserve injustice in society. He explains the difficulty of making it to school, “a journey which took you over, either directly o by way of a viaduct which arched head-spinning high above, a broad expanse of railroad tracks along which a constant traffic of freight backers, switch engines, and passenger trains made it dangerous for a child to cross. And that once the tracks were safely negotiated you continued past warehouses, factories, and loading docks, and then through a notorious red-light district where black prostitutes in brightly colored housecoats and Mary Jane shoes supplied the fantasies and needs of white clientele” (Ellison). By including a long list of things which a young boy must walk past just to get to school, Ellison creates an empathy within his reader for a poor, innocent boy being exposed from a young age to discrimination towards African Americans.
Wilkerson wants the reader to recognize that Newton's parents also fled the South, thereby connecting the origins of the Black Panthers and their fight for racial equality to the larger narrative of the Great Migration. The description of each migrant's journey out of the South paints a vivid picture of the effects of Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow on African Americans throughout the country. For instance, Robert P. Foster's experience driving west of Texas highlights the pervasive racism that persisted even outside the South. Despite being a skilled surgeon, Foster was denied service at hotels and restaurants due to his race, illustrating the far-reaching consequences of segregation and racial discrimination.
Consequently, Sunflower County was known as one of the worst counties on the subject of racial discrimination. Moye explained how with a decline in the need of sharecroppers many African Americans found it difficult to acquire a job. Consequently many Africans moved to find work in other cities. The author explains the racial discrimination occurrences within his text to explain the detrimental state of the poor community. For example, boycotts began to break out within white businesses.
He speaks about the story of Clyde Ross, a black man who fled horrible conditions in Mississippi to find work in Chicago. Like many Americans Ross dreamed of owning a home. However, the only way for a black person to buy a home in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century was to buy from predatory “contract” sellers who charged unbillable rates with few legal protections for buyers. Clyde said “To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, I took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza.” Like many blacks in Chicago at the time he got two jobs just to keep up with the payments of the house, overall being kept away from his
Andy was one of the few Black students attending my elementary school and I was drawn to him because of his incredible storytelling ability. I love to hear stories and he loved to tell them in an animated manner with all the appropriate expressions, changing his voice with each character and flailing his arms to show action. His gift for storytelling began to draw the attention of other classmates who were riveted to his every word. Hunched over and crowded around Andy at recess, all our eyes watched his every movement. His wrinkled, baggy khaki pants looked out of place with his carefully ironed shirt.
The books A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines and Kindred by Octavia E. Butler are set in different time periods but you can see the theme of society and setting playing a huge role on a person’s identity. The book Kindred is set over many years in the eighteen hundreds and in nineteen seventy six. The book A Lesson Before Dying is set in the nineteen forties. In both of these books you can see how the character’s setting affects how they act. Two main motifs that show through during these time periods in that of slavery and racism.
Humans live in a world where moral values are very clearly set determining what is good and what is bad. We know what scares us and how racism should be treated. Nevertheless, this was not the case back in Alabama during the 1950s. In the famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee narrates the lives of the people of Maycomb, Alabama, focusing on the story of Scout and Jem Finch, and the case of a said to be rape. In this emotion filled narrative, readers learn how life was back then not only in general, but for the separate social statuses that there was.
The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).