The main topics of the "Final Thoughts" section of our readings deals mainly with oppression. The first reading in this section is titled "Can White Heterosexual Men Understand Oppression?" written by Cooper Thompson, whom is in fact a white, heterosexual male, himself. ... numerous accounts in history and present day where there were cases of oppression that white, heterosexual males were not even involved in. The next reading in the "Final Thoughts" section is "How to Interrupt Oppressive Behavior" by Mary McClintock. Mary gives an example of jokes being made about Helen Keller's disabiliti...

• Word Count: 820
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: High School

... subject, but is very talkative about everything else. Coupled with his intelligence, he soon becomes friends with Scout and Jem. Their main curiosity over the summer months is the Radley house, in particular one of its strange occupants, Arthur Boo' Radley, who never comes out of the run-down house ... good proportion of the story focuses on the prejudices between the African Americans and the whites in the Southern States of the U.S.A. Chapters 2 and 3 Summary The summer is now over and Dill returns to his mother's, and Scout starts Grade 1 at the local school. She has been looking forw...

• Word Count: 10075
• Approx Pages: 40
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... or civilian communities. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan began trying to defend the white race. During the summer of 1919, 16 blacks were lynched. Whites rioted in 25 cities and beat and killed innocent women and children. This summer was called the "Red Summer". The Great Depression effected the entire nation. Whites were poor and blacks were worse off than before. During ... their rejection were bad health and illiteracy. Diseases could be cured but illiteracy was the bigger problem. The soldiers that had that problem were sent to classes to learn basic reading and writing. Segregation a...

• Word Count: 2547
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... To The White Fiends was written in 1922, when whites and blacks were in violent race conflicts in cities, this was referred to as "Red Summer". This sonnet depicts the protagonists' feelings about the events during that time. We will be looking at the first line in the sonnet. " ... written as a sonnet, in an ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme with a dactylic trimeter. In Bondage was also written in 1922, during the grim setting "Red Summer" like the poem To White The Fiends. In Bondage reflects McKay's thoughts of what life could be without the hate and violence opposed to the reality ... t...

• Word Count: 1452
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... age of six, Ralph began to attend Frederick Douglass Elementary School in Oklahoma City. Ellison was very bright student and his quest for knowledge was never-ending. There he started reading at a rapid pace and frequently visited the Paul Lawrence Dunbar Library. Ellison graduated with honors from an all black high school in 1939. In high school, Ellison was quite an ... college. At the peak of the Great Depression in 1936, Ellison traveled to New York to study sculpture and to find a summer job to pay for his last year in college. Some of the jobs that he was doing in the summer inclu...

• Word Count: 2599
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: High School

... A's, he was elected class president and was loved by all those in his class. He was also the only black in the neighborhood and school. A summer with his half sister, Ella Little, showed Malcom just what he was missing. In Boston Malcom was exposed to African-American life in such a way ... Haley was writing his autobiography. I do not fully understand why Elijah Muhammad allowed such politics to enter the Nation of Islam. It appeared from the reading that Mr. Muhammad truly cared for Malcom and his mission in building the Muslim religion. As I have not done extensive research on the Na...

• Word Count: 4036
• Approx Pages: 16
• Grade Level: High School

... who weren't cripples, to make money, making it twice as hard for him to do the same task. Maya finds that reading is fun for her. I don't know why anyone would take up reading as a hobby. It doesn't make sense, reading is one of those things that is only practiced with force is applied. the author that she's most in love with is ... a way; I wouldn't want to get a present from someone that didn't want me living with them, especially if it were my parents. They"re dad shows up in Stamps in the summer. It must have felt weird, seeing their dad after so long. I don't think I"d want to talk...

• Word Count: 859
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: High School

... more hardship. Her mother, Mary Gray Staples Harvey, died of cancer, and her father, Ralph Churchill Harvey died of a cerebral hemorrhage. During the summer of that same year, she received the Robert Frost Fellowship to attend the Breadloaf Writers" Conference. Shortly thereafter, her shining success was dulled by illness ... in her lifetime would end with her final and successful attempt at suicide in the garage of her home by carbon monoxide poisoning. In reading her poems it becomes obvious that the subjects of her poetry seem to be strongly related to her life. Her poems speak of the...

• Word Count: 3441
• Approx Pages: 14
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... militancy, "disparagement of the movements effectiveness, and emphasis on internal dissension" (Gitlin 27) were added to the already existent frames. The height of the Chicago Freedom Movement was in the summer of 1966. It consisted of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) along with Albert Raby and the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), which ... " it trivializes the movement in implying that King's presence is obsolete. This is also reiterated in the quote above that indicates Chicago was doing well without King. In the ...

• Word Count: 2489
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: High School

... jobs, they are retaining the advantages from the glass ceiling without necessarily realizing it. This trend has affected me personally as I had received a job at an attorney's office over the summer. My position was that of a clerical assistant, and a woman held the position before me. My boss had fired her knowing that I was going to replace her, as he actually told ... as many other people, the outlook of change in the future isn't too great. The unearned advantages that I have been receiving haven't really been brought to my attention until I began reading the books assigned in this ...

• Word Count: 1146
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... but in spite of his being black. He was regarded as an exception to the majority of Negroes, who were considered last and inferior. When he was a senior, Stokely began reading about the first student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the South. At first he thought that the students didn't know what they were doing, but in a few months ... the same year, SNCC formed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which gained national attention at the 1964 Democratic convention when it demanded some of the seats of the regular Mississippi summer of 1964, SNCC and its supporters suffered ...

• Word Count: 1763
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

... of madness, my mind began to click. The swirling messy cocktail of two abstract ideas started taking shape as I began remembering what I had learned earlier in school, and from my summer readings. At this point I came to the realization that a persons reality, that is that persons mental reflection of the society and or time in which he or she live in ... their reality. However this realization of mine makes perfect sense to me, and I will attempt to explain my thoughts to you in hopes that by the time you are finished reading this essay you will understand what I mean. The story "Battl...

• Word Count: 1729
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

After reading the book, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" I thought a lot about what the book was trying to explain. Throughout the awful events of the black girl, Maya's life, she stayed ... Momma, and her Uncle Willie who were both very strict. If Maya or her brother misbehaved they would be whipped with a belt. Today, that would be considered abuse. Young adults reading this book would be able to understand how badly this would affect the life of someone like Maya. Maya and her brother, Bailey, had to be moved back and forth ... it at that). When she was a little older she moved back to ...

• Word Count: 577
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: High School

... of this was happening in the context of protection by Momma's loving and authoritative competence and Bailey's loving companionship. Family life in the store included disciplined study of arithmetic; leisurely reading of novels, poetry, and Shakespeare; and lessons on deportment and avoidance of trouble with whites. Taken suddenly at age eight to live in St. Louis, Maya found her mother, whom ... fluidity and diversity, was exactly to Maya's liking. She performed well in school and took evening classes in drama and dance. When, at age fifteen, she went to spend the summer with her fathe...

• Word Count: 1226
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... progress as a society. Now that's not saying we haven't come a long way from the most brutal form of racism, which was slavery, but we are far from equal rights. I remember reading an article a while back that stated, "One in every three black males born today can expect to go to prison at some point in their life, compared with one ... always preached how important getting an education is especially as a person of color. They made sure I received the necessary help I needed to succeed in school from tutoring to academic focused summer programs. From birth I was exposed to literature, a...

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... the conflicts between her parents and her; she remarried. They moved to Brooklyn and then to New Rochelle; it was here that Jean found the library and his love for reading. He also loved the outdoors because it gave him solitude. Jean enjoyed craving, bicycling, swimming, fishing, and sailing. It was in a sailboat that his stepfather gave him that he would ... and remained intensely committed to it for a decade. The intensity that he held on to this lessened in the future, but he never really let go of it. In the summer of 1924 he went to Gurdjieff's institute to study this philosophy, ...

• Word Count: 1768
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... Bennett - Wedding Day Gwendolyn Bennett, one of the younger writers in the Harlem Renaissance, had been to Paris to study art on a scholarship from the Delta Theta Sorority .After the summer of 1926 she also wrote as a regular columnist for Opportunity and joined the Federal Arts Project . She also became a director of the G. Washington career school in N. Y. and died in 1981 ... is that this piece is shaped more philosophically than the usual bitter, depressing poems of writers like Countee Cullen and his From a Dark Tower. It is somehow depressing but after reading it a couple of time...

• Word Count: 4309
• Approx Pages: 17
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... for blacks to reach ii. Ballot stuffing or voter padding iii. Bribery iv. Legislature which withdrew voting district v. Financial requirement to vote e.g. Voting taxes vi. Literacy test which involved the reading of the constitution vii. Property ownership viii. Resident test Jim Crow Laws stated blacks could not ride in the same railroad as whites. Blacks had no access to many public ... of the animal. Ranching brought tremendous profits for example with a capital of $5000. , It reaped a capital of $45,000 in four years However due to the range wars and severe summer and winter between...

• Word Count: 1619
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... abandonment of that right. He reminds his readers that the constitutional and God-given rights of the Negroes has been put on hold for hundreds of years. If the clergymen reading this letter were to argue about whether these rights pertained to the Negro, King would be able to show inconsistency in the clergy's beliefs. For them to argue against the ... ensuring that all are treated equal. In reality, according to Dr. King, we only allow equality in certain areas and aspects of life. The events that occurred in Alabama that summer day in 1963 became what Dr. King called the beginning of...

• Word Count: 1396
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

... being colored. As a result, after school classmates would grab stones and tin cans from the ally and chase him home. Langston also had other negative experiences. James Presley notes "one summer in Chicago when he was a teen-ager Langston Hughes felt the American Dream explode in his face; a gang of white youths beat him up so badly that he went home ... American Dream will triumph." ("Langston Hughes", par 4 "Critical Reception") Roger was oblivious of the American dream, and Langston hoped people would recognize his flaws and learn to avoid them by reading his story. Roger did not wor...

• Word Count: 1559
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

... his life works. There were many people who helped shape him into the great writer he turned out to be. However, what I find to be most striking about Hughes" was reading about his determined nature. Through these next few pages, the history of Hughes" younger years will be explained, and how they influenced his poetry. Langston Hughes was born on February ... with being held back from what he truly wants to do. Even as a young boy he was ready to take chances in life. When Hughes was a teenager he spent one summer with his father James. Hughes learned that his father was racist towards ...

• Word Count: 1483
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

Morrison is a Nobel peace prize award winning African American writer who wrote The Bluest Eye. The Bluest eye is the sadden tale of a young black girl in a black community. When reading the novel, you meet and interact with many of the characters. Pecola Breedlove, the main character who suffers significantly in the society she's placed in. Her brother, who consistently tries ... house. Pauline and Cholly Breedlove, her unhappily married parents who pass their misfortunes on to their children. Frieda and Claudine McTeer, young girls reminiscing about their youth and the horrible summer when...

• Word Count: 2499
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• Has Bibliography

Huck is your average teenager with a mind for trouble, exploration, and humor. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may be viewed as one of the most controversial novels of today. As an adventurous sole tending to seek out potentially dangerous situations as well as try and alter people's trains of thoughts or self-images, Huck displays several instances throughout the novel show this type of treatment as well as conflicts between society, slavery, and opinion relating to racism and civilization. Furthermore, Huck is not sure of whether or not to let his inner-self influence his ongoing pursuit ...

• Word Count: 926
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... again! He didn't persuade me into believing anything he wrote (it's not like I understood much anyways) and I really believe that this book is to torture high school kids over the summer so they're brains could rot. This book could've been so much better off if it was an essay. I really believe that the shorter this book was, the better ... schoolwork depended on it. If you were to check it out, be cautious of how you want to read the book because it would take a long time! And I suggest re-reading a lot because it can be really confusing if you don't understand one thing. Just keep one...

• Word Count: 968
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: High School