When the call went out in the summer of 1961 for volunteers to ride buses throughout the South to help integrate public transportation, a large percentage of the people who made a commitment to take on this dangerous assignment were Jews. To be exact, nearly two-thirds of the Freedom Riders were Jewish which is “quite an amazing feat for a minority which made up less than 2% of the entire American population” (Weinblatt 5). Although Jews and African Americans are two very distinct, and often opposing, cultural groups in our society, the great struggle to end racism in America meshed these two groups tightly together. Their shared motivations, expectations and experiences in dealing with white racists during the civil rights movement are amazingly similar, especially when they are compared in the writings of African American essayist and activist James Baldwin and the personal recollections of the Jewish Freedom Riders. It is important to first discover what the reasons were for these Northerners (Jews and Baldwin) to travel into the South at around the time when the civil rights movement was just beginning to pick up speed. Baldwin decided to return home from Europe and venture into the South because he felt a great sense of guilt and helplessness while reading newspaper accounts about a young black woman who was humiliated and intimidated by white crowds in North Carolina while she was just trying to attend school. He experienced a powerful sense of outrage that “…made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her!” (“Take Me to the Water” 383). Similarly, the young Jewish volunteers were motivated by a sense of moral indignation at the mistreatment of African Americans, feelings based on the persecution that their own cultural group has suffered at the hands of bigots for centuries. One activist remembers having mixed feelings as he left his mother and wondered what she “… a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, thought as I boarded that train to join the fight for other people's freedom” (Honigsberg 7). It was mainly an overwhelming need to become personally involved, to do their part, in the fight for equal justice that was the driving force for both African Americans like Baldwin and the Jewish Freedom Riders.
Baldwin makes certain readers understand the states of the issue at once; his essay starts by describing his father’s funeral in the aftermath of the Harlem riots of 1943. Baldwin states, “As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discountent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas” (63). Yet as Baldwin mourned the death of his father, he celebrated the birth of his yo...
Elizabeth Jennings Graham set a new milestone for the civil rights movement on a typical Sunday morning, whether she planned it that way or not. In that July of 1854, the 24-year old school teacher was late for church. She was on her way to the First Colored Congregational Church on Sixth Street and Second Avenue to perform her duties as an organist (Biographicon.com). Accompanied by her friend Sarah Adams, Graham flagged down a carriage to reach her destination as quickly as possible. It did not read "Negro Persons Allowed in This Car," but she had no time to waste and didn’t particularly care either. As soon as they boarded the streetcar, the conductor told them to get off and wait for the next streetcar designated for Negroes, for this streetcar was for whites only. The women defended their ground and took a seat anyways, but the conductor said if any ...
American dream at the expense of the American’s Negros. Debate between Baldwin and Buckley. Baldwin was a superior persuasive and an intelligent man. Although, the audience were white college students who looks life Buckley, Baldwin was speaking confidently. He states about the black free labor in 1960s in America. As he states in the debate, America’s road, ports, cities and the economy was built by free labor of black people. However, they do not have fundamental right as human being. They are murdered, arrested, and suffered terribly by white people. He strongly described that black people in Selma, Alabama were brutally beaten. Therefore, the white people treated black people not as a citizen of the country, they treat
Throughout the essay Baldwin talks about his fathers hatred or mistrust towards whites such as the story of the white schoolteacher who Baldwin’s stepdad has an immediate mistrust towards. This path is the path Baldwin, throughout his life has rebel against his father against, however as time moved one Baldwin began to feel this fight/hatred that his father experience not because of his father but because of his actual experiences. We can use the story of the restaurant for examples of this as well as an example for Baldwin and his father similarities. In the story you can tell this is a transition of ideas especially for Baldwin and the idea of his father. Before the death of his father Baldwin and his father had different views of the world, where his father saw only the past and nothing of the future, Baldwin saw people, saw change waiting to happen, the niceness of whites not the nastiness his father was keen to. Baldwin declares “I knew about Jim-crow but I had never experienced it” about the restaurant he had been going to for weeks, the racism that he was receiving was never received by him, until his “eyes were open” by the death of his father. This was an unknowingly act from the author that further assimilated him and his fathers
After World War II, “ A wind is rising, a wind of determination by the have-nots of the world to share the benefit of the freedom and prosperity” which had been kept “exclusively from them” (Takaki, p.p. 383), and people of color in United States, especially the black people, who had been degraded and unfairly treated for centuries, had realized that they did as hard as whites did for the winning of the war, so they should receive the same treatments as whites had. Civil rights movement emerged, with thousands of activists who were willing to scarify everything for Black peoples’ civil rights, such as Rosa Parks, who refused to give her seat to a white man in a segregated bus and
This documentary is based on Raymond Arsenault’s book “Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice”. It was a radical idea organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) that alarmed not only those who challenged the civil rights but also deliberately defied Jim Crows Law that were enacted between 1876 and 1965, by challenging the status quo by riding the interstate buses in the South in mixed racial groups. This law segregated public services like public transportation, public places, public schools, restrooms, restaurants, and even drinking fountains for black and whites. Though these activists were faced by various bitter racism, mob violence and imprisonment, they were successful in desegregating the buses and bus facilities in the Deep South in September 22, 1961. They strove for nonviolent protest for justice and freedom of African Americans freedom.
James Baldwin, an African-American writer, was born to a minister in 1924 and survived his childhood in New York City. The author is infamous for his pieces involving racial separatism with support from the blues. Readers can understand Harlem as a negative, unsafe environment from Baldwin’s writings and description of his hometown as a “dreadful place…a kind of concentration camp” (Hicks). Until the writer was at the age of twenty-four, he lived in a dehumanizing, racist world where at ten years old, he was brutally assaulted by police officers for the unchanging fact that he is African-American. In 1948, Baldwin escaped to France to continue his work without the distractions of the racial injustice
Those studying the experience of African Americans in World War II consistently ask one central question: “Was World War II a turning point for African Americans?” In elaboration, does World War II symbolize a prolongation of policies of segregation and discrimination both on the home front and the war front, or does it represent the start of the Civil Rights Movement that brought racial equality? The data points to the war experience being a transition leading to the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the leader of a peaceful movement to end segregation in the United States this mission led him in 1963 to Birmingham, Alabama where officials and leaders in the community actively fought against desegregation. While performing sit-ins, marches and other nonviolent protests, King was imprisoned by authorities for violating the strict segregation laws. While imprisoned King wrote a letter entitled “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, in which he expresses his disappointment in the clergy, officials, and people of Birmingham. This letter employed pathos to argue that the leaders and ‘heroes’ in Birmingham during the struggle were at fault or went against their beliefs.
From slavery being legal, to its abolishment and the Civil Rights Movement, to where we are now in today’s integrated society, it would seem only obvious that this country has made big steps in the adoption of African Americans into American society. However, writers W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin who have lived and documented in between this timeline of events bringing different perspectives to the surface. Du Bois first introduced an idea that Baldwin would later expand, but both authors’ works provide insight to the underlying problem: even though the law has made African Americans equal, the people still have not.
The book, “My Soul Is Rested” by Howell Raines is a remarkable history of the civil rights movement. It details the story of sacrifice and audacity that led to the changes needed. The book described many immeasurable moments of the leaders that drove the civil rights movement. This book is a wonderful compilation of first-hand accounts of the struggles to desegregate the American South from 1955 through 1968. In the civil rights movement, there are the leaders and followers who became astonishing in the face of chaos and violence. The people who struggled for the movement are as follows: Hosea Williams, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, and others; both black and white people, who contributed in demonstrations for freedom rides, voter drives, and
James Baldwin is described in the film James Baldwin – The Price of the Ticket as a man who resisted having to deal with the racism of the United States, but eventually found that he had to come back into the country to help defend the cause of civil rights. Baldwin was an American writer who was born in 1924 and died in 1987. He wrote a wide variety of different types of books, examining human experience and the way in which love was a part of that experience. However, he was also very active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He was a voice that helped to bring about understanding, even if sometimes it was by slapping White America in the face. His message
On July 27, 1919, a young black man named Eugene Williams swam past an invisible line of segregation at a popular public beach on Lake Michigan, Chicago. He was stoned by several white bystanders, knocked unconscious and drowned, and his death set off one of the bloodiest riots in Chicago’s history (Shogun 96). The Chicago race riot was not the result of the incident alone. Several factors, including the economic, social and political differences between blacks and whites, the post-war atmosphere and the psychology of race relations in 1919, combined to make Chicago a prime target for this event. Although the riot was a catalyst for several short-term solutions to the racial tensions, it did little to improve race relations in the long run. It was many years before the nation truly addressed the underlying conflicts that sparked the riot of 1919. This observation is reflected in many of author James Baldwin’s essays in which he emphasizes that positive change can only occur when both races recognize the Negro as an equal among men politically, economically and socially.
Whenever people discuss race relations today and the effect of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, they remember the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was and continues to be one of the most i...
Like Dr. Martin Luther kind Baldwin believe that the only way to improve blacks social position was to accept what the white had did and integrate peacefully. Within his letter to his nephew he explains how the bitterness of his father lead him to suffer a terrible life he states “he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believe what white people said about him” (Baldwin, pg. 4). Baldwin explains how it is none other than the white men of this country who have put them in this position but he felt as though we can’t blame them forever because” those innocents who believe that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp on reality. But these men are your brother- your lost, younger brother” (Baldwin, pg. 9). Baldwin continues to emphasize the importance of acceptance when he tell his nephew “ you must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand, and until they understand it, they cannot be released (Baldwin, pg. 8). Baldwin truly did believe that we are all in this together and that we all must work with each other to make a world in which our children can live together. He wrote “For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great