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Keeping the Promise In her book The Promise, Oral Lee Brown discusses how she set out with the intention of helping one little girl and ended up changing the lives of twenty three children. She starts her narrative with a description of a child whose poverty worried her so much that her face haunted her dreams, and recounts how her search for the child brought her to Brookfield Elementary where she adopted a first grade class with the promise of sending them all to college if they graduated high school. The book discusses the influences in her life that led her to do what she did, as well as the struggles that came with trying to help so many children with her own limited resources. In the first chapter of the book called “The Education of Oral Lee Brown”, she explains how her early life in rural Mississippi helped to shape her later decisions in many ways. In the book, she describes how working the cotton fields with her family taught her discipline as well as how to manage with very little. She discusses Miss Grace, the elementary school teacher who inspired her to seek an education in hopes of a better life. Brown also recounts an incident in her childhood—when the local sheriff beat her brothers and her father decided not to pursue a lawsuit against him—that made such an impact on her that it changed the way she looked at the state that she grew up in as well as her view of her father as a man. Seeing her family’s opportunity to make a difference in the community turned down because her father feared the inevitable backlash made Brown and her brothers angry enough to do whatever they needed to do to leave Mississippi. It also gave her the determination not to miss another chance to make a difference in the communi... ... middle of paper ... ...ce and the struggle to achieve academic success in inner city public schools. The book looks beyond statistics that show the impact of the drug trade in communities like Oakland and into the lives of families that are most affected. Though the book’s intention is not to analyze the effects of the loss of jobs, teenage pregnancy and lack of parental involvement, it successfully does that and more as it presents the stories of these young people who have had to overcome all of those issues and more. This story should serve as an inspiration to anyone who wants to make a difference in their communities, as well as to anyone who wants to change their own situations. Reference Brown, O. & Millner C. (2007). The promise: how one woman made good on her extraordinary pact to send a classroom of 1st graders to college (Kindle ed.). New York, NY: Doubleday.
The Cocaine Kids and Dorm Room Dealers are two very different, but yet similar books. Cocaine Kids are about a group of kids, primarily of Hispanic race, with one kid of the Black race. The kids were raised in the inner city of New York. Dorm Room Dealers are about White, middle to upper-middle class college students, who was selling drugs for their status. The purpose of this paper is to prove that there are racial disparities among drug users. There will be examples from the texts that show the different takes on the drug markets and how race plays a factor. There also will be how these experiences shape the kids drug dealing and using. The paper will conclude how all the kids either remained in the drug career or left the drug career.
Kathy Harrison starts her personal story happily married to her childhood sweet heart Bruce. Kathy was living a simple life in her rural Massachusetts community home as the loving mother of three smart, kind, well-adjusted boys Bruce Jr., Nathan, and Ben. With the natural transitions of family life and the changes that come with career and moving, she went back to work as a Head Start teacher. Her life up until the acceptance of that job had been sheltered an idyllic. Interacting in a world of potluck suppers, cocktail parties, and traditional families had nothing in common with the life she would choose after she became a Head Start teacher.
The first one involves building an improved youth control complex. After all, if it were not for the resources he encountered as a youth, Rios would not obtain a spectacular education. His experience in Oakland taught him that “if we provide the right resources to catapult themselves out of marginalization, young people will deliver” (p. 162). If the youth control complex gets a redesign, it needs to give people an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. The second approach deals with managing dignity and freedom “for all young people” (p. 163). To do this, lawmakers must find a way to work with populations affected by social control, even if it means allowing social movements to influence policies. The final approach involves using the “One Youngster at a Time” approach (p. 164). According to Rios, “the key is to provide all marginalized youths with good props, good lighting, and a supportive audience. In this way, acts of resistance, resilience, and reform, which go hand in hand, can become the basis for helping young people transform their lives” (p. 166). If Oakland citizens can discover ways to “respect and embrace the work that young people do for dignity and freedom” (p. 164), not only would they change how the criminal justice system functions, but also how lives are
Raquel and Melanie are two poverty stricken students that attended University Height’s High School in the South Bronx, because their school was not federal funded, it lacked resources; so it does not come as a surprise, perspective students like Melanie and Raquel have more of a ...
In the book, “Manchild in the Promised Land,” Claude Brown makes an incredible transformation from a drug-dealing ringleader in one of the most impoverished places in America during the 1940’s and 1950’s to become a successful, educated young man entering law school. This transformation made him one of the very few in his family and in Harlem to get out of the street life. It is difficult to pin point the change in Claude Brown’s life that separated him from the others. No single event changed Brown’s life and made him choose a new path. It was a combination of influences such as environment, intelligence, family or lack of, and the influence of people and their actions. It is difficult to contrast him with other characters from the book because we only have the mental dialoged of Brown.
Anne Moody’s memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, is an influential insight into the existence of a young girl growing up in the South during the Civil-Rights Movement. Moody’s book records her coming of age as a woman, and possibly more significantly, it chronicles her coming of age as a politically active Negro woman. She is faced with countless problems dealing with the racism and threat of the South as a poor African American female. Her childhood and early years in school set up groundwork for her racial consciousness. Moody assembled that foundation as she went to college and scatter the seeds of political activism. During her later years in college, Moody became active in numerous organizations devoted to creating changes to the civil rights of her people. These actions ultimately led to her disillusionment with the success of the movement, despite her constant action. These factors have contributed in shaping her attitude towards race and her skepticism about fundamental change in society.
Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi is a narrated autobiography depicting what it was like to grow up in the South as a poor African American female. Her autobiography takes us through her life journey beginning with her at the age of four all the way through to her adult years and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. The book is divided into four periods: Childhood, High School, College and The Movement. Each of these periods represents the process by which she “came of age” with each stage and its experiences having an effect on her enlightenment. She illustrates how important the Civil Rights Movement was by detailing the economic, social, and racial injustices against African Americans she experienced.
Education is a privilege. The knowledge gained through education enables an individual’s potential to be optimally utilized owing to training of the human mind, and enlarge their view over the world. Both “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass himself and “Old Times on the Mississippi” by Mark Twain explore the idea of education. The two autobiographies are extremely different; one was written by a former slave, while the other was written by a white man. Hence, it is to be expected that both men had had different motivations to get an education, and different processes of acquiring education. Their results of education, however, were fairly similar.
To the modern white women who grew up in comfort and did not have to work until she graduated from high school, the life of Anne Moody reads as shocking, and almost too bad to be true. Indeed, white women of the modern age have grown accustomed to a certain standard of living that lies lightyears away from the experience of growing up black in the rural south. Anne Moody mystifies the reader in her gripping and beautifully written memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, while paralleling her own life to the evolution of the Civil Rights movement. This is done throughout major turning points in the author’s life, and a detailed explanation of what had to be endured in the name of equality.
Edin, Kathryn and Kefalas, Maria. 2005. Promises I Can Keep. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Coming of Age in Mississippi, an autobiography written by Anne Moody, tells the perspective of growing up black in the rural south. The book follows the story of Essie Mae, a three-year-old living in a rotten shack on a plantation. Throughout the book, Essie goes from a naive child to a more informed adult, taking place in the Civil Rights movement. First, I will start off by analyzing the events in her early childhood and the event that shaped her as a person. Then, I will point out the one significant event that led her to become an activist in the movement. Finally, I will connect the events from her early childhood through her college years and how those affected her involvement during the Civil Rights movement.
Currently there are about 600,000 people who live in the South Bronx and about 434,000 who live in Washington Heights and Harlem. This area makes up one of the most racially segregated areas of poor people in the United States. In this book we focus on racially segregated areas of poor people in the United States. In this book we focus on Mott Haven, a place where 48,0000 of the poorest people in the South Bronx live. Two thirds of the people are Hispanic, one-third is black and thirty-five percent are children. There are nearly four thousand heroin users, and one-fourth of the women who are tested are positive for HIV. All of this, and much more in one little area of the South Bronx. In the middle of all this chaos and confusion are children. Children who have daily drills on what to do if gunshots are heard, children who know someone who has died of AIDS, children who have seen someone been shot right in front of their face wondering if its their father, children who long to be sanitation workers, and children who die everyday. The lives of these children almost seem lost with depression, drugs, and death all around them.
Parents today know all too well how unsafe our schools are. All you have to do is turn on the news and there seems to be a story about violence in schools and how it is drug related. One of the largest contributors to juvenile violence and delinquency is the use of drugs. If it were as easy as just taking it away, we would see more academic achievements by young adults, but it goes much further than that. The problem is much deeper than it appears at the surface, and it takes strong individuals to be willing to go into the depth required to make a difference in the situation. In the story, "A New Tradition of Courageous Dissent," by Myron Glazer and Penina Glazer, they t...
In general, poverty is dominantly in inner-city neighborhoods. The isolation of poverty driven cities causes lower employment rate and diminishing government services such as school systems, health care, and police protection. The consequence of this is destructive environmental pressures such as violence, drug use, and gang affiliation (McLoyd, 1998). Poverty is more prevalent in African Americans and Latinos rather than white people. This correlates with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Association statistic that states African American drug use in ages 12 and up is 12.4% and 8.9% in the Latino community compared the 10.2% national average (SAMHSA, 2014). McLoyd’s childhood poverty graph shows that children under the age of five
Too many promising and deserving youths are being thrown into homes in high crime areas, and being expected to receive a quality education, sometimes while only being supported by one parent. This trend needs to stop, and it’s not going to fix itself. As Americans, if we have the ability to take actions, we have the responsibility to take actions. It is our job to end this spiraling problem and give the youths of America the proper upbringing that gives them the potential to do great things when they grow up to be prosperous