James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” paints a portrait of a Sunday social with ladies breaking out their best potluck dishes and men drinking and smoking and laughing at the trials and tribulation of everyday life. Children played and made merry. This all sounds like a perfect Sunday afternoon in the Old South. Many a Sunday were probably spent like this on neighbor’s porches to be sure, however, on this particular day a man was being murdered. The gruesome lynching described by Baldwin in this story can give even the most combat hardened veteran nightmares. The castration, evisceration, incineration and decapitation of the black man in this narrative was written as fiction. These events are far from fictional or even exceptional in the …show more content…
The overwhelming majority of those lives were black Americans (3,446). Lynching was not just about the public seeking vengeance for a crime committed. They were about power and oppression. During this time frame black Americans were “free” meaning they could not be held as slaves any longer. While abolishing slavery in 1865 was a step in the right direction it left black Americans without rights as citizens. While blacks could legally own property, sales to them were often met with bribes, coercing, or outright violence when attempted. Black were discouraged (threatened) from learning anything more than basic skills. Anyone teaching blacks about jobs that could be done by whites was often beaten and/or lost their job. Lynching was a constant threat for even minor disobedience or crime. Emmett Til was a 14 year old black male from Mississippi who was murdered simply for speaking to a white woman. The white woman was a clerk at a general store. Til was dared by his friends (as young boys often do) to speak to the attractive 21 year old store owner. Till spoke to the woman in a suggestive manner and then quickly left the store embarrassing himself in the process. When the store owner’s husband returned a few days later from a trip to Texas his wife relayed what had transpired with Til. In a fit of rage the husband went to Til’s home dragged him out of bed in the early hours of the morning, tossed him in a pickup truck along with 4 or 5 other men and proceed during the course of the next few hours to beat, shoot and thrown Til in to the nearby river resulting in Til’s death. In Baldwin’s “Going to see the Man”, the man that is murdered is accused of knocking over Mrs. Standish. While we are never told exactly what
‘Fire in a canebrake’ is quite a scorcher by Laura Wexler and which focuses on the last mass lynching which occurred in the American Deep South, the one in the heartland of rural Georgia, precisely Walton County, Georgia on 25th July, 1946, less than a year after the Second World War. Wexler narrates the story of the four black sharecroppers who met their end ‘at the hand of person’s unknown’ when an undisclosed number of white men simply shot the blacks to death. The author concentrates on the way the evidence was collected in those eerie post war times and how the FBI was actually involved in the case, but how nothing came of their extensive investigations.
During the late 1950?s and early 1960?s, many African nations were struggling for their independence from Europe. In ?Down at the Cross,? James Baldwin relates this struggle to that of blacks in the United States during the same time period, and there are far more similarities than Baldwin mentions. Although this comparison offers hope, demonstrating the power of blacks over white oppressors, the ongoing European presence in Africa is a painful reminder that independence and freedom are not complete.
Christopher Paul Curtis wrote The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 throughout the course of 1995. The novel follows the Watsons, a black family living in Flint, Michigan during the Civil Rights Era. In a historical context, 1963 and the early 1990s have far more in common than one would expect. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 following the church bombing in Birmingham, and yet race-based discrimination remains a problem even in our modern society via passive racism. This paper will analyze the ways in which Curtis’ The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 draws parallels between the time in which his is writing during and the time in which he is writing about. This analysis will also shed light on what can be called the “white standard,” wherein all things white are “good” or “better” and anything not-white is “bad.”
Notes of a Native Son is a nonfiction essay written by James Baldwin. The essay is about how Baldwin felt about his father and how he felt after his father had passed. Baldwin also realizes and comes to terms with many things during that time period. Racism is also one of Baldwin’s principal themes and uses it in many of his essays. Rebecca Skloot similarly wrote about a woman from near that time period. Skloot wrote an excerpt titled “The Miracle Woman”, the woman’s name in this piece was Henrietta Lacks whose cells would go on to live much longer than she did. Henrietta was a strong willed woman who had many children and knew when things weren’t right, so when she felt something was wrong with her uterus she went to the hospital and was diagnosed with cervical cancer. During Henrietta’s surgery a doctor took a slap of her uterus and grew her cells in a laboratory which became one of the most important cures and tools in medicine.
Four black sharecroppers (Roger Malcom, Dorothy Malcom, George Dorsey and Mae Murray Dorsey) are brutally murdered by a group of white people. The murders attracted national attention, but the community was not willing to get involved. The community was not fazed by these brutal murders but, by the fact that this incident got national attention. They were even more astounded that the rest of the nation even cared. In this book Laura Wexler shows just how deep racism goes. After reading the book I discovered that Fire in a Canebrake has three major themes involving racism. The first is that racism obstructs progression. The second is history repeats itself. The last theme is that racism can obscure the truth. This lynching, in particular, marks a turning point in the history of race relations and the governments’ involvement in civil rights. In the end this case still remains unsolved. No concept of the
In her Fire in a Canebrake, Laura Wexler describes an important event in mid-twentieth century American race relations, long ago relegated to the closet of American consciousness. In so doing, Wexler not only skillfully describes the event—the Moore’s Ford lynching of 1946—but incorporates it into our understanding of the present world and past by retaining the complexities of doubt and deception that surrounded the event when it occurred, and which still confound it in historical records. By skillfully navigating these currents of deceit, too, Wexler is not only able to portray them to the reader in full form, but also historicize this muddled record in the context of certain larger historical truths. In this fashion, and by refusing to cede to a desire for closure by drawing easy but inherently flawed conclusions regarding the individuals directly responsible for the 1946 lynching, Wexler demonstrates that she is more interested in a larger historical picture than the single event to which she dedicates her text. And, in so doing, she rebukes the doubts of those who question the importance of “bringing up” the lynching, lending powerful motivation and purpose to her writing that sustains her narrative, and the audience’s attention to it.
The Emmett Till murder shined a light on the horrors of segregation and racism on the United States. Emmett Till, a young Chicago teenager, was visiting family in Mississippi during the month of August in 1955, but he was entering a state that was far more different than his hometown. Dominated by segregation, Mississippi enforced a strict leash on its African American population. After apparently flirting with a white woman, which was deeply frowned upon at this time in history, young Till was brutally murdered. Emmett Till’s murder became an icon for the Civil Rights Movement, and it helped start the demand of equal rights for all nationalities and races in the United States.
Narrative is a form of writing used by writers to convey their experiences to an audience. James Baldwin is a renowned author for bringing his experience to literature. He grew up Harlem in the 1940’s and 1950’s, a crucial point in history for America due to the escalading conflict between people of different races marked by the race riots of Harlem and Detroit. This environment that Baldwin grew up in inspires and influences him to write the narrative “Notes of a Native Son,” which is based on his experience with racism and the Jim-Crow Laws. The narrative is about his father and his influence on Baldwin’s life, which he analyzes and compares to his own experiences. When Baldwin comes into contact with the harshness of America, he realizes the problems and conflicts he runs into are the same his father faced, and that they will have the same affect on him as they did his father.
Collecting the Harlem Riots It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in the stores. It would have been better, but it would have also been intolerable, for Harlem needed something to smash. This quote by James Baldwin pertains to his thoughts on the Harlem Riots of 1943. A copy of Newsweek from August 9, 1943 described the riot in great detail,?Within a half hour Harlem?s hoodlums were on the march.
Considering the circumstance of racial inequality during the time of this novel many blacks were the target of crime and hatred. Aside from an incident in his youth, The Ex-Colored Man avoids coming in contact with “brutality and savagery” inflicted on the black race (Johnson 101). Perhaps this is a result of his superficial white appearance as a mulatto. During one of his travels, the narrator observes a Southern lynching in which he describes the sight of “slowly burning t...
killing of seventeen whites. These blacks were sought out as wrong to many whites, and
James Baldwin, an African American author born in Harlem, was raised by his violent step-father, David. His father was a lay preacher who hated whites and felt that all whites would be judged as they deserve by a vengeful God. Usually, the father's anger was directed toward his son through violence. Baldwin's history, in part, aids him in his insight of racism within the family. He understands that racists are not born, but rather racist attitudes and behaviors are learned in the early stages of childhood. Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man is a perfect example of his capability to analyze the growth of a innocent child to a racist.
...dation and violence, including lynching, were an ever-present danger. Northern African Americans were not unaffected and suffered the same widespread discrimination and school and residential segregation.
Southern Horror s: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells took me on a journey through our nations violent past. This book voices how strong the practice of lynching is sewn into the fabric of America and expresses the elevated severity of this issue; she also includes pages of graphic stories detailing lynching in the South. Wells examined the many cases of lynching based on “rape of white women” and concluded that rape was just an excuse to shadow white’s real reasons for this type of execution. It was black’s economic progress that threatened white’s ideas about black inferiority. In the South Reconstruction laws often conflicted with real Southern racism. Before I give it to you straight, let me take you on a journey through Ida’s
The mental impact on family members of a lynching victim is life altering. Often being responsible for the retrieval of the body, families saw the representation of white hatred for them and their family members embodied in their corpse (Lee H. Butler). More than 2,805 families have endured this atrocious mental impact, because there were 2,805 documented lynchings from 1882 to 1930 (Braziel). That number does not take into account the lynchings that transpired after 1930, and outside of the ten categorically Southern states in the records.... ...