What Lies Beneath
Humans are all created equal, but people make different categories to separate themselves from each other. Race, gender, religion and culture are main categories, which separate humans and make the World an unstable place to live. As time goes by, people learn to get along with each other. This separation was demonstrated during the 1960’s, when African Americans were treated different than whites. After much suffering, blacks started to fight for their rights. The Black Panther Party For Self-Defense was one of these organizations, that flued the Civil Rights Movement. This organization, whose name was shortened to BPP, was founded in October 1966, in Oakland, California by Henry P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Eventually BPP had started spreading eastward through the black urban ghetto-colonies across the country. One city, in the middle of this racial evolution, was Richmond, California.
Mrs. Dextra Christiansen and her family were white family living in Richmond, in a pure black neighborhood during the Civil Rights Movement. As a child of a poor family from the South, Dextra experienced the winds of racial change, which had blown through the United States at that time. Due to the lack of white people living in Dextra’s neighborhood, she started making friends with the black kids. Her parents witnessed a murder of a white neighbor killed by the Black Panthers. Consequently, Dextra’s parents did not want her to be around African Americans. Dextra eventually become a friend with black kids, even though she was the only tall blond girl interacting with them. Everyday when Dextra and her friends played basketball her parents feared for her safety. They specifically had forbidden her to interact with others fro...
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...erican nation, and movements, which will change people lives forever in the future. While feeling that equality between all people from all races needs to be delivered in her teenager years she was marching proudly for the rights of all people.
The interview I had with a mother of my American friend was very interesting and inspiring to me. This interview was such an inspiration, it opened a door beyond the knowledge of the historian books I have read. Speaking with Mrs. Dextra Christiansen made me realize there is more to history then what we read in the books and watch on TV. As a young historian I felt I know too little about a real truth which lies beneath the dusty historian papers and books. I am glad that I had expanded my views on some of the major historical events in American History and that I could share some magnificent moments with my interviewee.
First time she ever accounts racism was at the Movie Theater, before she had even realized what it was. This incident made her start questioning what racism was and what made blacks and whites different. In Centreville, Mississippi where she lived with her mother and a sister (Adline) and brother (Junior). In Centreville they meet two other kids that just had happened to be white. Essie Mae had never been a friend with white kids. The two white children Katie and Bill would always ride their bikes and skates in front of Essie Mae yard. So they got their attention on one afternoon by making Indian noises to draw them to play with the others. Katie and Bill would let Essie ride their bikes and skates all the time, the others where too young to let them try. So they would grow a close relationship not knowing what others might think of these two groups playing. Every Saturday Essie's mother would always take them to the movies, where the blacks would have to seat in the balcony and whites could seat in the bottom level. But they saw Katie and Bill there so Essie and her bother and sister followed them to the bottom level. While mother was not noticing what was going on, when mother noticed she began to start yelling and pulling them out the door. The children begun to cry this would make mom just leave the Movie Theater.
As racism continues on to thrive in the town, Esther Hirsh, becomes a young girl who also faces discrimination only because she was a Jewish. In the same school as Esther, was a young African-American girl named Leonora who faces bully about almost every day, and everywhere, just because of her race. Her family is very well in poverty, and her mother is badly sick. She died later that month. In one quote,”Why can’t white folks leave me alone?”(P7), explains how excruciating racism was.
While in attendance at University of Georgia, Mary Frances Early, endured many blatant hardships and dehumanizing attitudes from her white counterparts. While attempting to enter the library a few Caucasian students created a “human barricade” in an attempt to block the entrance of the library. Mary Frances being the strong African American woman that she is stormed “full speed ahead” through the “human barricade” into the library to study.
Growing up as the young child of sharecroppers in Mississippi, Essie Mae Moody experienced and observed the social and economic deprivation of Southern Blacks. As a young girl Essie Mae and her family struggled to survive, often by the table scraps of the white families her mother worked for. Knowing little other than the squalor of their living conditions, she realizes this disparity while living in a two-room house off the Johnson’s property, whom her mother worked for, watching the white children play, “Here they were playing in a house that was nicer than any house I could have dreamed of”(p. 33). Additionally, the segregated school she attends was a “one room rotten wood building.” (p. 14), but Essie Mae manages to get straight A’s while caring for her younger sibli...
Janie’s first discovery about herself comes when she is a child. She is around the age of six when she realizes that she is colored. Janie’s confusion about her race is based on the reasoning that all her peers and the kids she grows up with are white. Janie and her Nanny live in the backyard of the white people that her Nanny works for. When Janie does not recognize herself on the picture that is taken by a photographer, the others find it funny and laughs, leaving Janie feeling humiliated. This racial discovery is not “social prejudice or personal meanness but affection” (Cooke 140). Janie is often teased at school because she lives with the white people and dresses better than the other colored kids. Even though the kids that tease her were all colored, this begins Janie’s experience to racial discrimination.
“Children are not blind to race. Instead, like all of us, they notice differences” and the character of Ellen Foster is no exception to the rule (Olson). Ellen Foster is the story of a strong willed and highly opinionated and pragmatic child named Ellen, growing up in the midst of poverty and abuse in the rural south. Her life is filled with tragedy from the death and possible suicide of her mother to the abuse she endures at the hands of her alcoholic father and his friends. Despite her hardships as such an early age, she never gives up hope for a better life. In addition to her struggles with poverty she is surrounded by a culture of racism in a society that is post Jim Crow
In “The Lesson” Toni Cade Bambara presents us with a group of angsty preadolescents who live in New York in the 1920s; this time period was a trying time for African Americans who constantly battled with the socio-economic tensions that resulted from their rival social class of privileged white people. Children like Sylvia grew up in broken family situations where it was more than common for parents to spend their days wasted away in the world of drugs and prostitution. Fortunately, Sylvia and her friends are taken under the wing of Miss Moore; they have little tolerance for her because they relate her presence with school due to the life lessons she attempts to teach the group. On the particular day that Miss Moore accompanies Sylvia and her friends to the FAO Schwarz toy store for another one of her lessons, Sylvia has a revelation about the growing tensions between African Americans and white people that causes her to deeply analyze some of the growing racial issues in her own community, state, and country as a whole.
During the course of this work, many ideas and themes are portrayed and readers are able to view subjects that surround the main topic of racial injustice and intolerance. With the three main narrators, Minny Jackson, Aibileen Clark, and Skeeter Phelan, the audience quickly gains an insight on how racial inequalities affected everyone. These thoughts help to form a plot that can easily keep readers entertained throughout the novel. During the course of the novel, there are many points in the plot that decide the actions and events other cha...
In Living for the City, Donna Murch details the origins and the rise to prominence the Black Panther Party experienced during the 1960s and into the 1970s. The Civil Rights Movement and eventually the Black Panther Movement of Oakland, California emerged from the growing population of migrating Southern African Americans who carried with them the traditional strength and resolve of the church community and family values. Though the area was driven heavily by the massive movement of industrialization during World War II, the end of the war left a period of economic collapse and social chaos in its wake. The Black Panther Party was formed in this wake; driven by continuing violence against the African American youth by the local police forces,
Martin Luther King once said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees fully embodies his idea of equality, by introducing the story of a fourteen-year-old white girl named Lily Owens, who lives during the time of the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina. Lily’s mother was killed in an accident when Lily is a little girl. Ever since, she lives with her father T-Ray, and her black surrogate mother, Rosaleen, in Sylvan, South Carolina. Soon after her fourteenth birthday, Lily escapes to the Boatwright sisters’ house in Tiburon, South Carolina, with Rosaleen, who is arrested for assaulting a white man. Upon her arrival, Lily faces different racist situations and meets her first love, a handsome black boy named Zach. The novel The Secret Life of Bees demonstrates that although racism has a negative impact on everyday life, it also influences Zach and Lily’s development in a positive manner.
The Black Panther had a huge background of history, goals, and beliefs. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, Ca 1966, founded the Panthers. They were originally as an African American self defense force and were highly influenced by Malcolm X’s ideas. They were named after Lowndes County Freedom Organization or LCFO. The Panthers had many goals like; giving back to the ghetto, protecting blacks from police brutality, and to help blacks get freedom and jobs. They also had many beliefs like; Malcolm X was a great person, and they believed that gun use was ok if necessary, or if people were oppressing the poor.
Nearly all of the problems the Black Panther Party attacked are the direct descendants of the system which enslaved Blacks for hundreds of years. Although they were given freedom roughly one hundred years before the arrival of the Party, Blacks remain victims of White racism in much the same way. They are still the target of White violence, regulated to indecent housing, remain highly uneducated and hold the lowest position of the economic ladder. The continuance of these problems has had a nearly catastrophic effect on Blacks and Black families. Brown remembers that she “had heard of Black men-men who were loving fathers and caring husbands and strong protectors.. but had not known any” until she was grown (105). The problems which disproportionatly affect Blacks were combatted by the Party in ways the White system had not. The Party “organized rallies around police brutality against Blacks, made speeches and circulated leaflets about every social and political issue affecting Black and poor people, locally, nationally, and internationally, organized support among Whites, opened a free clinic, started a busing-to prisons program which provided transport and expenses to Black families” (181). The Party’s goals were to strengthen Black communities through organization and education.
Race manifests itself as a key challenge to Jeannette’s views on freedom and immaterial love. She never truly saw people of other races in a different light until the family arrived in the small town of Welch, West Virginia. In Welch, racial divides were
The Black Panther Party was started in Oakland, California in 1966, when “Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton took up arms and declared themselves apart of a global revolution against American imperialism” (Bloom). They wanted to empower the black people to stand up for themselves and defend themselves against the police and their unjust ways. The police were the oppressor’s that kept blacks down and kept blacks from gaining any self-rights. In the book “The Forbidden History of the Black Panther Party”, Bloom quoted from Huey P. Newton stating that “Because Black people desire their own destiny; they are constantly inflicted with brutality from the occupying army, em...
For this assignment, the movie “The Help” was chosen to review and analyze because it presents a story of fighting injustice through diverse ways. The three main characters of the movie are Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan, a young white woman, Aibileen Clark, and Minny Jackson, two colored maids. Throughout the story, we follow these three women as they are brought together to record colored maids’ stories about their experiences working for the white families of Jackson. The movie explores the social inequalities such as racism and segregation between African Americans and whites during the 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi.