Segregation in the 1970s

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Recommended: How does racial segregation affect us

Imagine a world where prestige is evaluated by neither one’s character nor accomplishments, but predetermined by skin color. Visualize a world in which the nuances of skin color are used to sort and divide people amongst two factions: White or Black. Envision society segregated. Whites and Blacks tossed into two different worlds, as if mankind is a pile of dirty laundry which needs to be organized by color. The reality is this hypothetical world did in fact exist in the United States prior to the 1970s.
Racial segregation is one of the most recognized branches of social stratification in American history. Jeannette Walls was a witness of the effects of segregation. She was born on April 21, 1960 in Phoenix, Arizona. Thus, she lived through the segregation period in the Southwest. Her books reflect experiences of her life, such as growing up in poverty and being neglected by her parents. “The Glass Castle” is a perfect example of how she used literature to share her life experiences. “Jeannette Walls expertly turns her painful childhood into a book that depicts poverty from the understanding and point of view as a child, a teenager and an adult.”(Reno) Jeanette Walls also wrote “Silver Star”, a story which takes place in the South and revolves around two troubled teenage girls living in the seventies. One can infer she used the characters to reflect her own experiences growing up as a teenager in the seventies. Although the main characters in the book were fictional, the sociological conflicts people dealt with in this time period were real.
In the book Bean and Liz are abandoned by their mother Charlotte who has a meltdown and runs away after Bean finds out that Charlotte lied about having a boyfriend. This “tribe of three” is u...

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...ed this particular driver to know that we were being treated unfairly as individuals and as a people." (Brunner) The leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. , led the people into a peaceful protest against racial discrimination in order to one day make a reality of his dream to see the day where blacks and whites could be treated equally. In order to defend their rights as African Americans they cumulatively boycotted all buses for thirteen months.

Works Cited

Walls, Jeannette. The Silver Star: A Novel. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.
KIRCH, CLAIRE. "Writing What She Knows." Publishers Weekly 260.16 (2013): 24-25. Academic Search Premier. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.
Reno, Jenna. “The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.” Teen Ink. Teen Ink, 1989. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.
Brunner, Borgna . "Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement." Infoplease. Infoplease, 22 Apr. 2014. Web.

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