"A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty is a story that uses symbolism through the surroundings. The main character of the story is Pheonix Jackson, an old black woman who seeks out to find medicine for her sick nephew. She lives in the woods and faces the journey of walking through the snow to get to th...

The play A Raisin in the Sun was written by Lorraine Hansberry in 1959. The play takes place in Chicago sometime after World War II. The play is basically about a black family in Chicago who received a check for $10,000.00 in insurance money. The mother wants to use it to buy a house, but the son wa...

1. What is the literal purpose of Phoenix Jackson's trip? The literal purpose of Phoenix Jackson's trip is to travel from the country of Natchez to the city to obtain medicine for her sick grandson. 2. Where does she start and where does she end? Are there differences in the place from which s...

Eudora Wetly wrote a short story about an old Negro woman who came up in the days of the Civil War. The old Negro woman's name is Phoenix Jackson and she lives out on the Natchez Trace. This is around the time of slavery and blacks were still being treated badly. Phoenix was depicted as an i...

A former slave during the antebellum era, Lewis Clarke, said, "How would you like to see your sisters, and your wives, and your daughter, completely, teetotally, and altogether, in the power of the master. – You can picture to yourselves a little, how you would feel; but oh, if I could te...

THOUSAND PIECES OF GOLD Lalu was a Chinese-American pioneer woman who overcomes poverty, footbinding, and slavery to build a life of relative freedom in the American Northwest. From Shanghai to San Francisco, Lalu's courageous journey was an important contribution to the history of Asian ...

Elizabeth (Mumbet) Freeman Listen and Learn Elizabeth Freeman, an uneducated slave, is known to the world as Mumbet, a name apparently derived from Elizabeth. Lacking a surname, she adopted the name Freeman from the word freedom. In 1781, in Sheffield, Massachusetts, Elizabeth obtained an att...

The message this morning is based on the movie some of you saw on Thursday evening, "Driving Miss Daisy." The setting of the movie is the Atlanta, Georgia area in 1948 just before the civil rights movement. There are basically three main characters in the story, Daisy Wertham, a fine, rich...

"It takes a village to raise a child" is a quote that rings true in the African and African-American community. Starting with one's African roots and transcending to slavery, it was not uncommon for a woman who was not the biological parent of a child to raise him/her as if he/she were her very own ...

The Blacks Insatiable Demands I grew up in Africa, Ghana and Liberia to be exact. My image of the Blacks, was formed by what I would later come to understand that a form of indentured servants still exist in parts of the world. My grandfather as an architect lucked out on a contracted job to bui...

In the past, many groups of people have been seen down on and are even hurt by another group that believes that they are supreme. In the United States of America, the African American group has been seen down on by the "white" group. There was segregation between these two groups for man...

Racism is the belief that one race is superior to others. To most people, race is characterized by the shade of color of one's skin, the texture and color of one's hair, the size of the lips, the shape of the eyes, the size of the brow and bridge of one's nose, and other such externa...

Stereotypes "Dumb jocks", "Women don't belong in a professional setting, they belong in the kitchen", "He must be a Jew, just look at his nose." Our society is based solely on face values where we tend to place someone in a category because of his or her acti...

Katharine Drexel was the second child born of Francis Anthony and Hannah Jane Drexel, on November 26, 1858. A month after Katharine's birth, Hanna passed away, and for the next two years, Katharine and her older sister were taken care of by their aunt and uncle. After the time of two years h...

Stereotypes "Dumb jocks", "Women don't belong in a professional setting, they belong in the kitchen", "He must be a Jew, just look at his nose." Our society is based solely on face values where we tend to place someone in a category because of his or her actions. ...

Eudora Welty, in "A Worn Path" and Alice Walker in "Everyday Use" write about believable, well-developed characters, but Ms. Walker has the advantage of an insider's viewpoint since she is a black author writing about a black woman. Ms. Walker can tell a story through her o...

By definition, an outcast is "one who is cast out or expelled; rejected as useless"(Webster's Dictionary).The term "outcast" can be used to describe many of the characters in the novels Black L:ike Me, My Left Foot, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. These character...

The second largest continent in the world, Africa is huge, complex land mass occupied by thousands of tribes and nations. West Africa, from which most slaves came, contains tremendous differences in culture, language, and political and economic structure. An African woman could have expected to part...

In the times of slavery, there were two popular stereotypes of a black female – the loyal mammy and the promiscuous temptress. The former represented an "adamantine, kind, unattractive, and sexless woman" and it justified "abusive treatment of black women on the grounds that th...

The American Revolution was a time when America would transform from an extension of Britain into a new and independent nation. Although the Revolution gave way to new freedom and government, the rights of many groups were ignored during this period of time. The Declaration of Independence claimed...

Flannery O'Connor's short story "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is set during the early 1960's in the South. Not only was this the time of integration, but also, in a sense, the South's moral renaissance - a time to let go of the primitive prejudice and evolve into a tolerant society. However,...

Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments James H. Jones is the author of "Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment." The book was copyrighted in 1981. For two years, in 1974 and 1975, Jones worked closely with Fred Gray, the civil rights attorney who brought the class action suit o...

Greatest Canadian "Kites rise highest again the wind – not with it" said Sir Winston Churchill. In times of great difficulty, the cream always rises to the top. The greatest Canadians of all time have all had to deal with their own adversity, which has made them stronger. In ti...

William Byrd was born in Virginia in 1674. William Byrd received a quality education in England. He returned to Virginia after learning of his father's death. Byrd now had the responsibility of managing his inherited plantation. William Byrd character was constant. In "The Secret Diary of Wil...

The Peculiar Institution Men and Women While in slavery and even after gaining freedom, some slaves wrote down their recollection of that period during their lives. These recollections are called slave narratives- where the institution of slavery and its effects on the enslaved are naturally d...