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History grade 12 essay civil rights movement
Civil rights movement in the usa
Civil rights movement in the usa
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Annotated Outline and Works Cited
INTRODUCTION:
Every day we deal with the matter of race, the world we live in today is mixed with people of all kinds of nationality and color. Back in the 1940’s and 19550’s the idea of people of other race such as African Americans mingling into society was a major issue and in some ways still is today. As we read through the story “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison we see that race was indeed a major issue. The author uses verbal cues in her language, the matter of integration, and the two girls conflict through the story to indicate to the reader the matter at hand during that time.
OUTLINE/BODY PARAGRAPHS:
Verbal cues in Morrisons language
Two girls are paired as roommates
Where we first learn that one girl
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is African American and one is white. where the issue starts, during that time interaction between African Americans and whites were seen in some ways taboo Twyla says, “My mother won’t like you putting me in here.” (Morrison 2) Twyla’s mother has taught her daughter to be prejudiced “they never wash their hair and they smelled funny” (Morrison 2) throughout the story, some of these prejudices disappear and come about again when the two women meet again and again over long time spans. Toni Morrison also gives the reader social cues through the status of each girls life to who is African American and who is white. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, African Americans were not people with high social status according to Jacqueline Jones from The American Prospect, “In the 1940s and 1950s, Memphis was a place where blacks were concentrated in the lowest-paying, dirtiest, and most hazardous jobs.” Drew DeSilver from Pew Research Center “In 1954 the white rate averaged 5% and the black rate averaged 9.9%.in unemployment rates.” I bring this up because in the middle of the story Twyla and Roberta run into each other at the market and we find out that Roberta has married a wealthy man who works with according to Roberta “computers and stuff” (Morrison 114). African Americans did not have a high social status this meeting is a cue to the reader that Roberta is a white woman. “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison was not the only story that the matter of race was a major issue Kathryn Stockett’s Novel “The Help” is about African Americans working in white households in Jackson Mississippi The story is about the struggle these housemaids go through ranging from cooking, cleaning, taking care of white children and being humiliated daily. “THE HEAT WAVE finally passes round the middle a October and we get ourselves a cool fifty degrees. In the mornings, that bathroom seat get cold out there, give me a little start when I set down. It’s just a little room they built inside the carport. Inside is a toilet and a little sink attached to the wall. A pull cord for the lightbulb. Paper have to set on the floor. When I waited on Miss Caulier, her carport attached to the house so I didn’t have to go outside. Place before that had a maid quarters. Plus my own little bedroom for when I sit at night. This one I got to cross through the weather to get there” (Stockett 7). This piece of chapter seven gives insight into how African American housemaids were treated and humiliated along with the rest of the story The matter of integration in the story In “Recitatif” we learn that integration was a major issue when the two women once again meet this time while Roberta is picketing she says “They want to take my kids and send them out of the neighborhood. They don’t want to go” (Morrison 156) The article “The Journey to School Integration,” also by Toni Morrison describes the struggles that African Americans faced during the 1940’s and 1950’s In the article, Toni Morrison explains to the reader not only the humiliation that African Americans felt but the humiliation of being denied a decent education like other children.
Morrison not only explains the distance of the schools but also explains the poor conditions of the schools that African Americans were sent to ranging from broken down buildings, few or poor conditioned textbooks, underpaid teachers and many more problems.
Further, into the article, Morrison explains the hardships African Americans went through in order to be heard. Such as, protesting, being hosed, beaten, jailed and even killed in order to be heard, in order to gain a decent education.
Lastly, the article explains the pride, the joy that was felt by African Americans when the Supreme Court made a decision on the Brown Case.
The case Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka was according to Brown V. Board of Education
“a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all” (Paragraph
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1). This case is one of the most famous cases because it gave hope to African Americans that they would one day be treated equally.
“Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools. In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (Paragraph 5-7).
On May 17, 1954, the judge ruled in favor of Brown saying, “In the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place, as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.” As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment” (Paragraph 11).
This was a major milestone for African American rights.
Conflict between Twyla and Roberta
The main conflict in the story is Twyla trying to rekindle the relationship she had with Roberta as
kids The story starts with the two girls being paired as roommates and Twyla saying “My mother won’t like you putting me in here” (Morrison 2) already suggesting there is a problem In this time African American and whites did not associate, despite that Twyla and Roberta form an unlikely friendship. You could say in some ways Twyla is Jealous of Roberta and her life. I say this because during the visit with their parents Twyla says, I sneaked a look at Roberta. Her mother had brought chicken legs and ham sandwiches and oranges and a whole box of chocolate-covered grahams. Roberta drank milk from a thermos while her mother read the Bible to her. Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people (Morrison 32-33). The first time the girls meet after the orphanage Twyla is working at Howard Johnson’s and thinks to herself that, “She made the big girls look like nuns” (Morrison,36). During this encounter, Twyla starts her journey of trying to rekindle their relationship which in some ways she fails at. Roberta acts stuck up and rude towards Twyla criticizing the fact that she doesn't know who Jimi Hendrix is. She acts this way because she had friends around her and Twyla was an African American women talking to her. In the story, it says after the conversation she was “dismissed without anyone saying goodbye” (Morrison 50). Implying that she was not wanted around. The second time the girls meet in a supermarket once again Twyla seems to be jealous of Roberta “Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world” (Morrison 67). In this encounter the girls talk about their lives, catching up and reminiscing. Twyla later asks Roberta why she had been so rude to her at Howard Johnson’s to which Roberta replies saying “Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was” (Morrison 139). At the end of the encounter the girls promise each other to stay in touch, but Twyla thinks to herself “I knew I wouldn't. Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie” (Morrison 148). The third encounter Roberta is picketing her children being bussed out of the neighborhood to a different school. In this encounter, the girls fight about everything unable to get along. Roberta ends up complicating the relationship, even more, when she claims that Twyla “Kicked a poor black lady” (Morrison 174). Twyla gets defensive and the girls end up having a verbal altercation over whether Maggie was black or not. In the end, Twyla says “ You're the liar! Why don't you just go on home and leave us alone. Huh?” (Morrison 178). The last encounter They meet at a diner where Roberta is in a silver gown and possibly drunk. The girls end up talking and Roberta apologizes for the last encounter saying that she lied about Maggie “We didn't kick her. It was the Gar girls. Only them. but, well, I wanted to” (Morrison 200). At the end of the story, the two women resolve their complicated relationship. How race is still an issue today We see how race is still is in some ways still an issue today, even if it is not a prominent issue like it was in the 1940’s and 1950’s. According to Jeff Nesbit of U.S News & World Report When young, black teenage men are shot and killed by white police officers and trigger extraordinarily intense social commentary about racial tension in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, it means we haven't solved the equation yet (Paragraph 2). Although race issues aren't quite as prominent today we still have racial tension. For example, Aug. 9, 2014, there was unrest in Ferguson, Missouri when according to Larry Buchanan and others from New York Times Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. The shooting prompted protests that roiled the area for weeks. On Nov. 24, the St. Louis County prosecutor announced that a grand jury decided not to indict Mr. Wilson. The announcement set off another wave of protests. In March, the Justice Department called on Ferguson to overhaul its criminal justice system, declaring that the city had engaged in constitutional violations (Paragraph 1). Although, this is only one example of race issues there have been others. CONCLUSION: In Conclusion, we have seen that “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison gives insight to the issue of racism in the 1940’s and 1950’s through verbal cues in her language, the matter of integration, and the two girls conflict through the story to indicate to the reader the matter at hand during that time. We also see from other sources the race issues of today's time.
In “Recitatif,” by Toni Morrison, racial divides are implemented throughout the story due to circumstance and place. The setting or other characters involved in the story or the actions they take often closely relate to how the two girls feel towards one another. Throughout their lives, Twyla and Roberta vary on whether or not they should be friends with one another due to racial divides, although it is not ever explicitly stated.
Board of Education was a United States Supreme Court case in 1954 that the court declared state laws to establish separate public schools for black segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children that access was denied to Topeka’s none colored schools. Brown claimed that Topeka 's racial segregation violated the Constitution 's Equal Protection Clause because, the city 's black and white schools were not equal to each other. However, the court dismissed and claimed and clarified that segregated public schools were "substantially" equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. After hearing what the court had said to Brown he decided to appeal the Supreme Court. When Chief Justice Earl Warren stepped in the court spoke in an unanimous decision written by Warren himself stating that, racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Also congress noticed that the Amendment did not prohibit integration and that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal education to both black and white students. Since the supreme court noticed this issue they had to focus on racial equality and galvanized and developed civil
“The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision holds up fairly well, however, as a catalyst and starting point for wholesale shifts in perspective” (Branch). This angered blacks, and was a call to action for equality, and desegregation. The court decision caused major uproar, and gave the African American community a boost because segregation in schools was now
Before the decision of Brown v. Board of Education, many people accepted school segregation and, in most of the southern states, required segregation. Schools during this time were supposed to uphold the “separate but equal” standard set during the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson; however, most, if not all, of the “black” schools were not comparable to the “white” schools. The resources the “white” schools had available definitely exceed the resources given to “black” schools not only in quantity, but also in quality. Brown v. Board of Education was not the first case that assaulted the public school segregation in the south. The title of the case was shortened from Oliver Brown ET. Al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka Kansas. The official titled included reference to the other twelve cases that were started in the early 1950’s that came from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. The case carried Oliver Brown’s name because he was the only male parent fighting for integration. The case of Brown v. Board o...
The case started with a third-grader named Linda Brown. She was a black girl who lived just seen blocks away from an elementary school for white children. Despite living so close to that particular school, Linda had to walk more than a mile, and through a dangerous railroad switchyard, to get to the black elementary school in which she was enrolled. Oliver Brown, Linda's father tried to get Linda switched to the white school, but the principal of that school refuse to enroll her. After being told that his daughter could not attend the school that was closer to their home and that would be safer for Linda to get to and from, Mr. Brown went to the NAACP for help, and as it turned out, the NAACP had been looking for a case with strong enough merits that it could challenge the issue of segregation in pubic schools. The NAACP found other parents to join the suit and it then filed an injunction seeking to end segregation in the public schools in Kansas (Knappman, 1994, pg 466).
The case of brown v. board of education was one of the biggest turning points for African Americans to becoming accepted into white society at the time. Brown vs. Board of education to this day remains one of, if not the most important cases that African Americans have brought to the surface for the better of the United States. Brown v. Board of Education was not simply about children and education (Silent Covenants pg 11); it was about being equal in a society that claims African Americans were treated equal, when in fact they were definitely not. This case was the starting point for many Americans to realize that separate but equal did not work. The separate but equal label did not make sense either, the circumstances were clearly not separate but equal. Brown v. Board of Education brought this out, this case was the reason that blacks and whites no longer have separate restrooms and water fountains, this was the case that truly destroyed the saying separate but equal, Brown vs. Board of education truly made everyone equal.
Brown v. Board of Education, which was the 1954 Supreme Court decision ordering America’s public schools to be desegregated, has become one of the most time-honored decisions in American constitutional law, and in American history as a whole. Brown has redefined the meaning of equality of opportunity, it established a principle that all children have a constitutional right to attend school without discrimination. With time, the principles of equality that were established, because of the Brown trial, extended beyond desegregation to disability, sexuality, bilingual education, gender, the children of undocumented immigrants, and related issues of civil equality.
The Supreme Court is perhaps most well known for the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. By declaring that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Kevern Verney says a ‘direct reversal of the Plessy … ruling’1 58 years earlier was affected. It was Plessy which gave southern states the authority to continue persecuting African-Americans for the next sixty years. The first positive aspect of Brown was was the actual integration of white and black students in schools. Unfortunately, this was not carried out to a suitable degree, with many local authorities feeling no obligation to change the status quo. The Supreme Court did issue a second ruling, the so called Brown 2, in 1955. This forwarded the idea that integration should proceed 'with all deliberate speed', but James T. Patterson tells us even by 1964 ‘only an estimated 1.2% of black children ... attended public schools with white children’2. This demonstrates that, although the Supreme Court was working for Civil Rights, it was still unable to force change. Rathbone agrees, saying the Supreme Court ‘did not do enough to ensure compliance’3. However, Patterson goes on to say that ‘the case did have some impact’4. He explains how the ruling, although often ignored, acted ‘relatively quickly in most of the boarder s...
African-Americans endured poor academic conditions throughout the entire United States, not just in the south. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, the segregated school had no nurse, lockers, gym or cafeteria. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, buses were not available to the African-American school, but were available to the white schools. In Wilmington, Delaware, no extra curricular activities or buses were offered to the African-American school. In Washington DC, the situation in segregated schools was the same as in the other states, but the textbooks were outdated. (Good, 21-34)
This brings us to the Toni Morrison short story “Recitatif”. This short story encourages an African American or ethnically minded style of understanding. The driving force for the thoughts and actions of both Twyla, Roberta, and the other characters is race and race relations. Those two events may seem like nothing, but it shows how even at the early age of 8, children are taught to spot the differences in race instead of judging people by their character.
The next big step in the civil rights movement came in 1954, with the BROWN vs. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA case, where Thurgood Marshall, representing Brown, argued that segregation was against the 4th Amendment of the American constitution. The Supreme Court ruled, against President Eisenhower’s wishes, in favour of Brown, which set a precedent in education, that schools should no longer be segregated. This was the case which completely overturned the Jim Crow Laws by overturning Plessy vs. Ferguson.
The National Center For Public Research. “Brown v Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (USSC+).” Supreme Court of The United States. 1982 .
In the story, “Recitatif,” Toni Morrison uses vague signs and traits to create Roberta and Twyla’s racial identity to show how the characters relationship is shaped by their racial difference. Morrison wants the reader’s to face their racial preconceptions and stereotypical assumptions. Racial identity in “Recitatif,” is most clear through the author’s use of traits that are linked to vague stereotypes, views on racial tension, intelligence, or ones physical appearance. Toni Morrison provides specific social and historical descriptions of the two girls to make readers question the way that stereotypes affect our understanding of a character. The uncertainties about racial identity of the characters causes the reader to become pre-occupied with assigning a race to a specific character based merely upon the associations and stereotypes that the reader creates based on the clues given by Morrison throughout the story. Morrison accomplishes this through the relationship between Twyla and Roberta, the role of Maggie, and questioning race and racial stereotypes of the characters. Throughout the story, Roberta and Twyla meet throughout five distinct moments that shapes their friendship by racial differences.
The Civil Rights Movement marked a crucial moment in United States history. African Americans fought for their right to be treated equally and to put an end to discrimination and segregation. Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” features two girls of the opposite race and how their friendship was affected during this time period. The United States has come a long way since the days of slavery, but African Americans’ rights were still not being fully recognized. As a result of this the Civil Rights Movement developed to peacefully protest for equality. Toni Morrison’s short story, “Recitatif”, takes place during the Civil Rights era of the United States to show the reader how stereotyping, discrimination, and segregation affected two girls,
In the 1954 court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of schools was unconstitutional and violated the Fourteenth Amendment (Justia, n.d.). During the discussion, the separate but equal ruling in 1896 from Plessy v. Ferguson was found to cause black students to feel inferior because white schools were the superior of the two. Furthermore, the ruling states that black students missed out on opportunities that could be provided under a system of desegregation (Justia, n.d.). So the process of classification and how to balance schools according to race began to take place.