Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas J. Sugrue is a comprehensive description of the civil rights movement in the North. Sugrue shows Northern African Americans who assembled against racial inequality, but were excluded from postwar affluence. Through fine detail and eloquent style, Sugrue has explained the growth and hardships integral in the struggles for liberties of black Americans in the North. The author explores the many civil rights victories—such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Act of 1965—but also takes the reader on a journey of many lesser known issues that occurred throughout states in the North and Mid-west United States. Sugrue illustrates the struggles of black
Deep in a swarm of 500,000 women, men, and children; a small huddle of girls headed by lead singer MILCK sang their song “Quiet”, loudly, for all the world to hear during the Women’s March on Washington in 2017. Their voices carried a tune of faith, hope, and power, which Jill Lapore echoed in her work “Wars Within”. Lapore’s writing is essential to providing significant insight into the election of 2017 by connecting to past historical moments which many members of James Madison’s student body can recollect and link to the severity of the election results. Lapore uses the connections between the civil war era and present day America to tie together the presence of inequality in simple historical terms. The usage of this connection allows for readers to compare cause and solution to possibly be persuaded to enact change as Fredrick Douglass did in the past.
In Anne Moody’s memoir, she is faced with many obstacles and one of the major ones is her own mother, Toosweet. Toosweet resists the urge for the movement to continue because she projects her fear of change very clearly while Anne on the other hand is desperately aspiring change for blacks in the southern community. Toosweet sustains a hold on Anne encouraging her to live her life as everyone else and so she continues standing as a barrier between Anne and the movement. Yet, Anne finds all the more reason to continue her work as a member of the NAACP and Core. Anne not only wants to end segregation but to prove to her mother that she is capable of such an advance.
The novel is a conversation between Alexander and the United States Criminal Justice system, white people, people of color; she uses the passion of an activist to talk to the people and inform them that if they care about the future, humanity, and equality, America needs to start paying attention to the lesser-known injustices and microaggressions to make a change in to end the “racial caste system” in which Americans have been living in for far too long. Alexander enhanced a complex topic by effortlessly recounting it without any elementary language or speech. Her work, while easy to comprehend, may still be hard to read for all of the driven language and the truths that she reveals about America’s past, as well as its present. While the book points out that the similarities of our current Justice system to the old Jim Crow Laws are not as stark, Alexander never points out the differences, which makes her analogy incomplete in its full comparison. This may be done for the effect to take the reader’s attention away from the dissimilarities as the United States commonly only focuses on the differences of how people of color were treated then versus now because it is certainly less extreme.
Not only was the author trying to convey the civil rights movement and the impact it had on his life, but he also was trying to explain how it affected the South. Despite government efforts to establish equality in the American people the white supremacy and resistance caused a sluggish change in the South. It took racially charged events and violence to make a small impact on the cultural divide. The author also enlightens the reader on how in present day the South attempts in every way to pretend that such a resistance did not exist. The privileged, pretentious white community then audaciously moves on as it nothing has happened in an attempt to soothe it plagued conscience.
Racism and racial inequality was extremely prevalent in America during the 1950’s and 1960’s. James Baldwin shows how racism can poison and make a person bitter in his essay “Notes of a Native Son”. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “A Letter from Birmingham Jail” also exposes the negative effects of racism, but he also writes about how to combat racism. Both texts show that the violence and hatred caused from racism form a cycle that never ends because hatred and violence keeps being fed into it. The actions of the characters in “Notes of a Native Son” can be explain by “A Letter from Birmingham Jail”, and when the two texts are paired together the racism that is shown in James Baldwin’s essay can be solved by the plan Dr. King proposes in his
The use of the house, the bus, and the development of light to dark convey the underlying tension among the characters as well as in their treatment of desegregation. Similar to the passengers in the bus, the reader is transported to the heart of the context of the story: the integration of black people into the community. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” shows a masterful manipulation of the setting as evidenced by its ability to enrich the mood and context of the
Mamie specifically wrote this book to tell her son’s story, representing hope and forgiveness, which revealed the sinister and illegal punishments of the south. She wanted to prevent this horrendous tragedy from happening to others. The purpose of the book was to describe the torment African Americans faced in the era of Jim Crow. It gives imagery through the perspective of a mother who faced hurt, but brought unity to the public, to stand up for the rights of equal treatment. This book tells how one event was part of the elimination of racial segregation.
Many white collar workers get laid off, and they have everything to offer for a job. People in today society feel as if the blue collar workers had a good education and did everything right bad things would not happen to them. But this is not the case. The last reading is Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor published in 1965 and was taken from her short story collection. This reading is about a older women and her son riding a bus to go to the Y for classes to get back on the healthy track of life.
The U.S. Field Artillery saw significant advancements after the Civil War and into the First World War: technological advancements, the implementation of the Forward Observer, and changes in the method in which field artillery was implemented in battle. Coming out of the Civil War America was hesitant to invest in research and development of their Field Artillery. Therefore, the U.S. Artillery began to fall behind the advancements of the rest of the world was making. European nations had invested in improving artillery, creating bored canons with recoil mechanisms and breech-loading capabilities.
I really enjoyed reading this book, because it adds on to your knowledge of segregation and tells you what an average black family had to go threw from the 1880’s to the middle of the 1950’s. The Claudette Colvin story inspires me and many other people to stand up for what is right, even if there might be some consequences.
Racism and Injustice are terms that individuals in today’s society don’t fully understand. In order to understand something, you must first be educated upon it. In Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody, the author uses amazing descriptive details to explain the hardships of a young African American female in the late 1940’s. The main character Essie Ma, later known as Anne, daughter of Toosweet Davis and Diddly Moody is raised on a plantation with her siblings Junior and Adline. The book is split into four different sections of Essie Ma’s life childhood, high school, college, and the movement.
The world was changing in the 20th century and moral changes to society were progressing. Many social changes are present in the characters of the stories of this time period in different moral ambiguities. These moral ambiguities enhance the character's personality and gives more depth to the stories. In Everything that rises must Converge Julian’s mother wanted to give the little african american kid a piece of candy because she thought he was cute; However, she did not realize the racist side of what she was doing so when the mom turned her down she was shocked.
“Everything that Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor Southern gothic literature often revolves around damaged and delusional characters. Within that genre, Flannery O’Connor, a southern gothic writer, focuses heavily on moral and ethical issues, especially those relevant to southern culture during her time period. “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is one of the most classic examples of O’Connor’s writing style and the southern gothic genre in that it includes an unstable mother and a disturbed son, as well as touches on one of the most pertinent social and moral conflicts in the south during the 1950s and 60s, the prejudice against African-Americans. The story is set in the south in the 1960s, during the time of racial integration.
Clyde Farmer Civil Rights Essay The Civil Rights Movement started in the 1950s and gained steam during the 1960s with the help of activist and those wanting a better future for themselves, their people, and their country. The Civil Rights Movement features prominent social activist and regular citizens doing civil disobedience for awareness and protest to show their discontent with the way blacks are treated within the United States. There were also governmental changes that help forward the movement and propel the future. The laws, people and events helped put the United States onto a path towards equality and a reason to rethink its own definition of “freedom” in the Unites States.
