Ever is a Long Time by W. Ralph Eubanks and Dixie by Curtis Wilkie are two well written memoirs that attempt to explain the struggle the two authors face while growing up in Mississippi, leaving Mississippi as adults, and later in life returning to Mississippi to reconcile with the state’s dark past. Additionally, one can argue that Curtis Wilkie, a poor white, and W. Ralph Eubanks, a middle class black, are not the stereotypical persons that one may expect to write about the racial inequalities of Mississippi because neither experiences racism early in life. However, the authors are masterful in allowing readers to see Mississippi from their perspectives and allowing the readers to see how the authors eventually returned to reclaim their home states.
To begin, in Ever is a Long Time, Ralph Eubanks starts his memoir by explaining that he grew up on a farm away from the racial strife that he found to exist in his early teenage years. Therefore, early on in life, he was unaware of the racial turmoil being played out all around him. For example, Eubanks describes his parents as “college-educated professionals” (4) and he writes, “[w]hen I was growing up, it all seemed painfully normal, nothing exceptional.” (5) Furthermore, Eubanks describes how he had developed an escape from the darkness that Mississippi held by developing an “inner life where I wrote letters to children in faraway countries, and read books about those places that helped to sequester me from that topsy-turvy world of race and racism” (7) However, as the years passed Ralph Eubanks would become aware of the presence of racism within his world.
Next, the Mississippi that Ralph Eubanks describes as a child was quickly splintered as the author found that the ...
... middle of paper ...
...r understanding of how downtrodden blacks were in the South. Nevertheless, both Ralph Eubanks and Curtis Wilkie could not hide from the intrinsic ideals of being a native Mississippian. Even though they both went on to prosperous lives and families, neither could escape the inner desires they possessed about a Mississippi they remembered as children. The Mississippi they remembered from their early lives invoked a pastoral sense of slower times, green pastures, and people who genuinely seemed concerned with your well being. Overall, one can see where this is the one part of their lives that they could not seem to figure out until they eventually returned to their homelands and faced the ghosts and shadows of the past.
Bibliography
Eubanks, W. Ralph. Ever is a Long Time. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Wilkie, Curtis. Dixie. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.
The stories that the author told were very insightful to what life was like for an African American living in the south during this time period. First the author pointed out how differently blacks and whites lived. She stated “They owned the whole damn town. The majority of whites had it made in the shade. Living on easy street, they inhabited grand houses ranging from turn-of-the-century clapboards to historics”(pg 35). The blacks in the town didn’t live in these grand homes, they worked in them. Even in today’s time I can drive around, and look at the differences between the living conditions in the areas that are dominated by whites, and the areas that are dominated by blacks. Racial inequalities are still very prevalent In today’s society.
McMillen begins by tracing the roots of segregation in Mississippi beginning with common law and later evolving into state sponsored apartheid with the Plessey v. Ferguson decision and the new state constitution of 1890. The need for separation between the races arose out of feelings of “negrophobia” that overcame the white citizens of the South during the period of Jim Crow. Negrophobia was an overwhelming fear by white males in the South that if the races were in close proximity of each other the savage black men would insult the heavenly virtues of Southern white women. As a result black boys in Mississippi learned at an early age that even smiling at a white woman could prove dangerous. Although segregation was vehemently opposed by Black leaders when it was first instituted, by the 1890’s leaders such as Booker T. Washington began to emphasize self-help over social equality. The fact that Mississippi’s institutions were segregated lead to them being inherently unequal, and without a...
The United States of America, the land of the free. Mostly free if the skin tone matches with the approval of society. The never ending war on racism, equality, and segregation is a huge part of American culture. Prior to the Civil Rights Movement equality was laughed at. People of color were highly discriminated and hated for existing. During the years nineteen fifty to nineteen seventy, racism began to extinguish its mighty flames. Through the lives of numerous people equality would soon be a reality. Through the Autobiography “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody first person accounts of all the racism, social prejudice and violence shows how different America used to be. The autobiography holds nothing back, allowing the author to give insight on all the appalling events and tragedies. The Re-telling of actual events through Anne Moody’s eyes, reveal a connection to how wrong segregation was. The “Coming of Age in Mississippi” is an accurate representation of life in the south before and during the Civil Rights Movement.
Work and racial consciousness are themes during the Civil Rights Movement that made Anne Moody’s autobiography a unique story. Her amazing story gave the reader a great deal of insight on what it was like to live in rural Mississippi in the middle of a Civil Rights Movement. As an African American woman, she also provided the reader on how her gender and race impacted her life. Coming to Age in Mississippi was an awe-inspiring autobiography of the life of Anne Moody, and provided a lot of information about the social and political aspects of what was going on during her life.
Mississippi serves as a catalyst for the realization of what it is truly like to be a Negro in 1959. Once in the state of Mississippi, Griffin witnesses extreme racial tension, that he does not fully expect. It is on the bus ride into Mississippi that Griffin first experiences true racial cruelty from a resident of Mississippi.
The cultural transition from youth to adulthood in the U.S. is often a period of chiefly physical maturation, accompanied by progressive changes in perceptions of the world that surrounds oneself. The years in which Anne Moody grew up in Mississippi were marked by often vicious racism, regardless of the emancipation of African-American slaves some 80 years earlier. The laws of many of the former Confederate states, such as the Mississippi Black Codes, often included in them provisions to severely limit the rights of African-Americans. Such passages as the Mississippi vagrant law, fining ‘idle’ blacks, illustrate this through the underhanded encouragement to keep blacks in their former place of servitude. Anne Moody’s coming of age in the era of the oppressive Black Codes was not only that of physical change, but chiefly one of mental growth from that of a victim of the injustices of the Southern U.S. to an active agent of change for her fellow African-Americans.
The main character is completely alienated from the world around him. He is a black man living in a white world, a man who was born in the South but is now living in the North, and his only form of companionship is his dying wife, Laura, whom he is desperate to save. He is unable to work since he has no birth certificate—no official identity. Without a job he is unable to make his mark in the world, and if his wife dies, not only would he lose his lover but also any evidence that he ever existed. As the story progresses he loses his own awareness of his identity—“somehow he had forgotten his own name.” The author emphasizes the main character’s mistreatment in life by white society during a vivid recollection of an event in his childhood when he was chased by a train filled with “white people laughing as he ran screaming,” a hallucination which was triggered by his exploration of the “old scars” on his body. This connection between alienation and oppression highlight Ellison’s central idea.
In this paper I will inform you with a few of these events and topics such as the Civil war, slavery, as well as facts of the state. I hope my readers walk away with a new respect and outlook of Mississippi and learn how the past can affect the future, as well as the beauty.
This historic broadcast, in which Mississippians for the first time were presented a black perspective on segregation and civil rights, has never been located. Nonetheless, recordings of irate reactions by Mississippians slurred with racist epithets, “What are you people of Mississippi going to do? Just stand by a let the nigger take over. They better get his black ass off or I am gonna come up there and take it off” (Pinkston, 2013), have been found preserved at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Some say, history is the process by which people recall, lay claim to and strive to understand. On that day in May 1963, Mississippi’s lay to claim: Racism.
The dark nature of the past she feels so connected to is what makes her poetry so powerful and good at capturing the way others were treated based on social and cultural norms at the time. It is difficult to determine what Trethewey believes the future of America and more specifically Mississippi will look like, but it is evident in her writing that it’s history is incredibly significant. Trethewey’s parents broke the law in Mississippi by going to be married in Ohio and then moving back as explained in her poem, “Miscegenation.” Eventually they had Trethewey, who is a biracial woman, and because of the laws in Mississippi her existence was essentially illegal. She was not supposed to exist under Mississippi law and that speaks to the culture
The transition of being a black man in a time just after slavery was a hard one. A black man had to prove himself at the same time had to come to terms with the fact that he would never amount to much in a white dominated country. Some young black men did actually make it but it was a long and bitter road. Most young men fell into the same trappings as the narrator’s brother. Times were hard and most young boys growing up in Harlem were swept off their feet by the onslaught of change. For American blacks in the middle of the twentieth century, racism is another of the dark forces of destruction and meaninglessness which must be endured. Beauty, joy, triumph, security, suffering, and sorrow are all creations of community, especially of family and family-like groups. They are temporary havens from the world''s trouble, and they are also the meanings of human life.
W.E.B. Du Bois is a world-renowned American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, and author whose life goal was to educate African Americans and whites about the realities of race by posing and answering the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” On the other hand, William Faulkner is an American writer whose specialty in Southern and American literature won him a Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford. Faulkner’s Southern literature illustrated the difficulties of being behind a societal veil, with special attention to gender and racial issues. Both of these authors have attempted to tackle the difficult questions regarding race and addressed some ties between race and economics. Du Bois focuses on the black narrative and Faulkner
Today, the United States is still a racially segregated society. Getting into college is the first step in a student’s postsecondary educational journey, an academically strong start in college is the second because grades can either expand or limit opportunities for successfully completing a college degree . College students face many obstacles throughout their pursuit of higher education. Racial Segregation can affect college academic performance in a variety of ways. Segregation represents a major structural feature influencing success in college. Segregation experienced in childhood can influence later academic performance through a rage of channels. Segregation has other, more contemporaneous influences on academic performance. Massey
Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi is a narrated autobiography depicting what it was like to grow up in the South as a poor African American female. Her autobiography takes us through her life journey beginning with her at the age of four all the way through to her adult years and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. The book is divided into four periods: Childhood, High School, College and The Movement. Each of these periods represents the process by which she “came of age” with each stage and its experiences having an effect on her enlightenment. She illustrates how important the Civil Rights Movement was by detailing the economic, social, and racial injustices against African Americans she experienced.
Gaines, his novel full of descriptive language and intriguing story line gives the reader an opportunity to grasp the main theme and evoke the feelings and emotions that the reader can relate to. Although Gaines was raised being introduced to the civil rights movement spreaded to the south he writes more about the maintenance of white supremacy and the characters having the opportunity to face the oppression of slavery they have been going through for their whole entire lives(Tucker, 2011). In each paragraph Gaines shifts narrators that represent different man collectively telling their claims of racism as being individual acceptances instead of a systematic design of the states. Figurative language Gaines uses in his writings is symbolism as he portrays the characters with similar characteristics to the states principles and what he has seen in his lifetime. Gaines likes to describe his writing of being more like African-American history that has not been told sharing the registries of the African American perspective. With the little reading and research that I have done I am very fond of Gaines writings and his chosen genres, many African American children forget