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The Invisible Black Cowboys
For many Americans, the image of the cowboy evokes pleasant nostalgia of a time gone by, when cowboys roamed free. The Cowboy is, to many Americans, the ideal American, who was quick to the draw, well skilled in his profession, and yet minded his own business. Regardless of whether the mental picture that the word cowboy evokes is a correct or incorrect view of the vocation, one seldom views cowboys as being black. The first cowboy I met was from Texas and was black. After he told me that he was a cowboy, I told him that he had to be kidding. Unfortunately, I was not totally to blame for my inability to recognize that color has nothing to do with the cowboy profession; most if not all popular famous images of cowboys are white. In general, even today, blacks are excluded from the popular depiction of famous Westerners. Black cowboys were unheard of for almost a century after they made their mark on the cattle herding trade, not because they were insignificant, but because history fell victim to prejudice, and forgot peoples of color in popular depictions of the West and Western history.
Black Americans were in the West with Lewis and Clark, but this was never seen or published until the 19th century (Ravage 26). California was the section of the west that most blacks settled in before the Civil War. The largest concentration of blacks in the state was in Sacramento County, mainly because of the gold rush. Blacks would ride trade ships to the west coast and then desert, if they were slaves, or leave the ship, if they were free men, to settle there (Savage 12). Examples of early black settlers were two ex-slaves named Bob and Kanaska who came to San Diego in 1816 on the schooner Albatross. Thomas Fisher came to California around 1818 but was captured by pirates in Monterey that year. Another Fisher came to California in 1846 while serving on a whaling ship (Savage 13)
Though present from the initial discovery of the West, blacks entered the West in earnest after 1850. Between 1850 and 1910, thousands of African Americans, lured by the promise of land, opportunity, and most importantly, racial justice migrated to the trans-Mississippi West (African Americans). This great migration occurred shortly after the civil war, as thousands of blacks moved West because they were unwanted in the North or South (Dick 30).
Most blacks came to America involuntarily. Sold as slaves in Africa, they were brought to America as laborers. Being slaves, they were legally considered property and thus were excluded from the legal protections that other people living in America were entitled to. Slave marriages were not legally recognized, and parents and children could be separated at the whim of their owners. As Frederick Douglass and countless other narratives by former slaves have shown us, slaves were forced to rely on a network of extended family members and other slaves to ...
The development of the Western genre originally had its beginnings in biographies of frontiersmen and novels written about the western frontier in the late 1800’s based on myth and Manifest Destiny. When the film industry decided to turn its lenses onto the cowboy in 1903 with The Great Train Robbery there was a plethora of literature on the subject both in non-fiction and fiction. The Western also found roots in the ‘Wild West’ stage productions and rodeos of the time. Within the early areas of American literature and stage productions the legend and fear of the west being a savage untamed wilderness was set in the minds of the American people. The productions and rodeos added action and frivolity to the Western film genre.
This book showed the struggle between rich and poor. The two main groups of the story were the Socs and the greasers. The Socs are in the upper class while the greasers are the poor ones that dislike the Socs because they have more money, better cars, and act like they are better than the greasers. The Outsiders is a good story by S.E. Hinton that shows the struggles of growing up Hinton did a fine job with the character development, the plot, and the theme with a few flaws.
The two largest religions in the world are Islam and Christianity and they have several facts of contact. Both inbred from Judaism an acceptance of one God, the creator of the world and cares about the beliefs and behavior of human beings. In spite of having some points of principle in common, Christianity and Islam have enormous differences, not merely in beliefs regarding salvation, Christ and forgiveness but in several other fields affecting human attitudes, behavior and daily life.
The Great Migration was the movement of two million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West between 1910 and 1940. In 1900, about ninety percent of African Americans resided in formed slave holding states in the South. Beginning in 1910, the African American population increased by nearly twenty percent in Northern states, mostly in the biggest cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland. African Americans left the rural south because they believed they could escape the discrimination and racial segregation of Jim Crow laws by seeking refuge in the North. Some examples of Jim Crow laws include the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks (“The History of Jim Crow). In addition, economic depression due to the boll weevil infestation of Southern cotton fields in the late 1910s and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 forced many sharecroppers to look for other emplo...
After the civil war, United States took a turn that led them to solidify as the world power. From the late 1800s, as the US began to collect power through Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines, debate arose among historians about American imperialism and its behavior. Historians such as William A. Williams, Arthur Schlesinger, and Stephen Kinzer provides their own vision and how America ought to be through ideas centered around economics, power, and racial superiority.
The West has always held the promise of opportunity for countless Americans. While many African Americans struggled to find the equality promised to them after the Civil War, in the West black cowboys appeared to have created some small measure of it on the range. Despite this, their absence from early historical volumes has shown that tolerance on the range did not translate into just treatment in society for them or their families.
When the newcomers came to the north and west Starling, Gladney, and Foster it wasn’t a warm welcome. Wilkerson says that often when immigrants from the southern states came to the north or west mostly people closed the door on them and didn’t want to help. It a long time for them to find there place in major cities of the North and West, but southerners who stayed end up finding their way using elements of the old culture with the new opportunities in the north. Also traveling to the newer states wasn’t easy for African Americans. They usually traveling by train, boat or bus. And it was very dangerous to travel because of the gas station your able to stop at and even stop to get food. Also the long trips ahead. You would never know what troubles would be head of the journey. Typically once the black citizens arrived in the state it was hard to settle and to find a job with leak of skills. Like Ida Mae husband George ended up hauling ice up flights of stairs in cold Chicago and Ida Mae did domestic jobs before finding a decent job. Wilkerson also states that it took them a long time before really get settled in an affordable home in south side of Chicago. Then the journey to south was not cheap to make it far so many African Americans took in mind that having money before leaving would be the
A typical Western would usually be set in the late 19th century in the mid-west of America in a remote town. The town is usually small, lonely and unwelcoming. Typically a western set looks like it is in the middle of a desert with sand, cacti and tumbleweed which gives a desert look, there are usually never any lakes or rivers around these features make the place look really hot and deserted. The buildings are generally timber board houses with swinging doors and outside the buildings are places to keep their horses, there is also always a General Store and a Saloon. Horses and carriages and cattle are used to give a western feel. The cowboys are typically dressed in western style clothing for example they wear simple shirts and jeans they may also wear ponchos, waist coats, hats, boots with spurs, guns and a belt to hold the gun and bullets, Hero's tend to wear lighter clothing and the villain’s tend to wear darker clothing.
The cowboys of the frontier have long captured the imagination of the American public. Americans, faced with the reality of an increasingly industrialized society, love the image of a man living out in the wilderness fending for himself against the dangers of the unknown. By the end of the 19th century there were few renegade Indians left in the country and the vast expanse of open land to the west of the Mississippi was rapidly filling with settlers.
The black migration gather everything that they have and start of the new century together, as a unit, with 204,000 individuals leaving in the first decade. Around World War I, the pace accelerated, and continue through the 1920s. In fact, by the 1930s, 1.3 million southerners were leaving to other regions. In the 1930s, the great depression, wiped out job opportunity, for all. Unfortunately, the affected ones were the African Americans, in the northern industrial belt, this caused a sharp reduction in migration. Furthermore, the second great migration began around 1940, as the country was gathering up to start entering World War
Indians had been moved around much earlier than the nineteenth century, but The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the first legal account. After this act many of the Indians that were east of the Mississippi river were repositioned to the west of the river. Tribes that refused to relocate ended up losing much of their land to European peoples (Sandefur, p.37). Before the Civil War in the U.S. many farmers and their families stayed away from the west due to a lack of rainfall (Nash et al., 2010). Propaganda in newspapers lured Americans and many other immigrants to the west to farm. The abundance of natural grasses in the west drew cattlemen and their families as well.
Beginning in the 1919 and lasting through about 1926 thousands of Blacks began to migrate from the southern United States to the North; an estimated 1 million people participated in what has come to be called the Great Migration.[1] The reasons for this mass movement are complicated and numerous, but they include search for better work, which was fueled by a new demand for labor in the North (particularly from the railroad industry) and the destruction of many cotton harvests by the infectious boll weevil ...
Throughout history it is evident that many religions have been tried, tested, and, for some, radically changed. Many religions have gone through periods of time in which the way they were run or enforced underwent changes in practice and leadership. In many cases disagreements and differing outlooks among members of certain religions were to blame for these changes. Christianity and Islam are two examples of religions that have experienced changes over the course of their existence. While these religions seem to have little in common at first glance, both have strikingly similar pasts that consist of radical splits due to disagreements among members of the Christian and Islamic churches, resulting in new branches within each religion.
However much Islam and Christianity would seem to share common ground, the discussion is not complete without noting the parallels between this two that have taken center stage. Some of the remarkable differences as they try to answer deep life complexities arise in the areas of religious practices by both their adherents and the clergy (Dorothy 13-28). “There is also a stark contrast to the belief system subscribed to, means of salvation, scriptures”. The most prominent difference present concerns the belief of life after death and practices of depicting the metaphysical