During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the black population was enslaved and tortured by whites. African Americans were treated as animals, denied the right to life, forced to work endlessly, and suffer abuse from their masters. White Americans forced the blacks to become slaves d...

The poem "Sympathy", by Paul Laurence Dunbar suggests to the reader a comparison between the lifestyle of the caged bird, and the African American in the nineteenth century. Paul Laurence Dunbar's focus of "Sympathy" is how the African American identifies and relates to the frustrations and pain t...