Summary Of Spout Spring A Black Community

Spout Spring: A Black Community, written by Peter H. Kunkel and Sara Kennard, describes an actual neighborhood through an ethnography stand point the conglomerate stories. These accounts come from actual African Americans but the names of the participants and town remain hidden and fictitious for safety reasons. The authors talk about the inner city or ghetto and what it’s like to integrate with white people it describes the relationship some African Americans with a white dominated society. Kunkel and Kennard wanted the actual participants to put volunteer for data from interviews they even listened to the early rough drafts of the book. The advice and comments that gave are in the back of the book. Three subjects that the authors talk in

They did surveys and collected data from each individual account I found the number of unskilled black men to be relatively high. We have to take in account the time frame and period these collecting’s were made this happened around 1968 the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement was going on at this time. This of course effected the lives of several African Americans so before segregation I believe many weren’t given the opportunity to learn other skills besides blue collar work. A lot of the traditional “negro roles” as the authors described consist of the same jobs most African Americans had during the Jim Crow era. For instance Kunkel and Kennard state “Unskilled jobs for men include maintenance and clean-up jobs of various kinds; for women, domestic day work and other non-specialized domestic jobs. These are the traditional Negro jobs in Sequoyah.” The data they collected actually lines up with traditional gender roles African Americans had on pages 29 -30 they have a table of the collected data. There are a total of 250 adults in Sequoyah 42 people they said weren’t actually working out of the group. There were 54 unskilled men and a72 unskilled women and 8 aren’t even looking for work because they were housewives. So most who grew up with the traditional values accept the job barrier I’m assuming the older

I feel like these topics create some generic stereotypes about black people that should be explained thoroughly. The first stereotype that comes to mind is that poor areas or densely black populated areas create a lot of crime and drugs. Some people think that we are responsible for most of the crime that goes on in America this is wrong on many levels. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) website the percentage of blacks killed by blacks is 90% while white on white crime is 83% in the year of 2013. Most crimes and drug use happens interracial therefore the crime is afflicted upon ourselves beside African Americans only make up 13% of the population in the U.S. These statistics and information came to my mind when the authors talked about the white university students who used marijuana and LSD. Kunkel and Kennard findings were a bit conflicting due to the fact that the white students also suggested that drug use is widespread in the black community of Sequoyah. Several black individuals denied any drug use and it shows you how people have this warped perception about black people. The values and beliefs of the Sequoyah black community can be directly tied to the Protestant practice they have 3 different dominations and churches. Religion is a big deal in the black community and still is today