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Taking Risks In Frederick Douglas's Poem 'Mother To Son'

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Sometimes inequalities of a time period cause the people affected to take risks.In the poem “Mother to Son,” the speaker is a black woman speaking to her son. The text suggests that the speaker had to risk breaking rules in order to keep moving forwards. The speaker says to her son “Don’t you stop now for ise still going” During times of segregation, black people had to break rules and take risks in order to move forward. Frederick Douglass was a slave in America during the 1800’s. In his book “The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass,” he talks about how he managed to learn to read. He would trade bread with some of the white boys in his neighborhood and in return they would teach him to read. He also taught himself by challenging some of the local kids to letter writing contests. This shows that taking risks to read and write was important because reading and writing is important to being a free person. In “Learning to Read,” the speaker and some of her fellow freed slaves are living in the south where they are not allowed to read. Many people took risks to learn. One person hid books in his hat in order to read them later. When the speaker learned to read …show more content…

In the story “Lion lights,” the main character creates an invention in order to keep lions away from the cattle. He makes the invention out of scrap pieces and he doesn’t know if it will work. The village uses his invention and it works. The village had to take a risk in order to see if the invention would work. In the story “The Day I saved a life,” the narrator tries to save a baby shark from a fisherman. In the story, the narrator goes up to the fisherman and tells him about how sharks are important to the ecosystem. The fisherman is convinced by the narrator to release the shark back into the water. The narrator had to take the risk of talking to the fisherman in order to save the shark. In these stories, risks had to be taken in order to save

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