“‘I have a dream that one day the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood’” Martin Luther King Jr. 12.5 million African’s were captured and sent to America, only 10.7 million survived the trip. Half of those who were captured fought for their freedom and weren’t successful. At the age of eleven she was captured, sold into slavery, abused, raped and forced to grow up too fast. Through the eyes of Aminata Diallo, Lawrence Hill creates The Book of Negroes, revealing the intense life of an African slave.…
Deborah Gray White, author of Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, courageously plunges into the research and understanding of the slave experience through race and gender. The overall slave experience of the antebellum South is often represented by the male experience. For the first time, White brings forth an understanding of slave life through the female lens. White reasons that the female slave experience differed from the male slave experience due to the assigned gender roles.…
The film “Iron Jawed Angels” portrays the events that took place between 1912 and 1913 back when women still didn’t have the right to vote. The movie setting starts off in Philadelphia, where the two young activists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns have a meeting with the two main leaders of NAWSA (National American Women Suffrage Association), Carrie Chapman and Anna Howard. The young suffragists urge the women of NAWSA to try and work on passing a constitutional amendment for women to have the right to vote, however, the older women of NAWSA are persistent on taking their own route to success, preferring a state-by-state approach. They then permit Paul and Burns to take over the NAWSA committee in Washington D.C. where they gather a parade to promote…
Book Review I chose to analyze and review the book Freedom is a Constant Struggle Ferguson, Palestine, and The Foundation of a Movement by Angela Davis. Throughout this book are essays, interviews, and speeches that Angela uses to identify the connection between state violence and oppression that has happened in the past and that’s still happening today. She reflects the importance of black feminize, intersectionality and prison abolition throughout the United States. Davis was a new assistant professor of philosophy, who was soon looked at as a threat and stripped of her position and shortly after incarcerated.…
If you asked multiple people what they thought of history and history books they might say, It’s boring…those books are filled with bias opinions. Well Danielle L. McGuire’s book, At the Dark End of the Street, is defiantly not boring. Reading this book helps me better understand the role African American women had, and how it was so important. This is a book mentions not only the struggles African Americans had during the civil rights movement, but the struggles women faced specifically. You always hear about the super famous men who started and influenced the movement, but what about the women.…
The entire Angela Davis lecture was phenomenal. She discussed so many topics and interacted with the audience, which turned the lecture into a fun experience and not only informative but also very entertaining to listen to and watch. I would grade the lecture with an A. I love how she related everything from the past to present because in reality not much has changed when it comes to racism and slavery and the challenges we face as not only African American but also being an African American woman. One of my favorite parts was how she ended the lecture with a question and answer portion and how many of the students were not afraid to ask very challenging questions and of course her response was just as in depth.…
A Review of Camp's Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South Stephanie M. H. Camp's Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South is a book whose central theme is premised on the idea of slavery. The book takes an approach that explains the relationship between masters and slaves as one that was guided by the use of different geographical spaces for both parties. Therefore, the author presents a scenario that introduces the concept of 'black spaces' and 'white spaces' that are antagonistic. The book goes a step further to examine the role that such geographical spaces played in the emancipation process. Camp takes the position that holds the idea that slaves' actions…
Truth demonstrated going beyond the controversial imperatives and thus fighting for not only women’s rights but making it known that those who were enslaved deserved their rights…
The speeches “Ain’t I a Woman?”, “What Time of Night It Is”, and “Keeping the Thing Going while Things Are Stirring” by Sojourner Truth and the autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs discuss the critical combination of racial and gender equality. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs are former slaves and are credible, trustworthy speakers on the topics of race and gender, but because of their different experiences, they tackle the issues from different angles. Jacobs seems to speak on racial and slave issues from a woman’s perspective, whereas Truth speaks on women’s issues from the…
Iron Jawed Angels Movie Review The movie, Iron Jawed Angels, directed by Katja Von Garnier, depicted the women's suffragist movement during 1869-1914. On the brink of World War One, women all across America decided that their time to vote and participate in politics was now, and fought for their rights as citizens of the Unites States of America. The movie focuses on the life of Alice Paul (acted by Hillary Swank), as she separated herself from the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and formed the National Women's Party (NWP) to help women gain the right to vote.…
The foundation of Mitchell’s essay, “Her Side of His Story: A Feminist Analysis of Two Nineteenth-Century Antebellum Novels—William Wells Brown's ‘Clotel’ and Harriet E. Wilson's ‘Our Nig.’”, is how different representations of various black female writers in the nineteenth century lead to various characterizations of black women and their search for freedom. Mitchell compares William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, two novels which Mitchell categorizes as influenced by the nineteenth-century English and American Romanticism trend of literature that both tell stories of black females and their experiences while attempting to attain freedom. Mitchell focuses on the differing intents and genders of each of the authors thus…
Angela Davis’s book Freedom is a Constant Struggle, is an amazing book that reflects about different topics that we have gone over in class. Davis thoroughly examines the connections in our society that oppress us throughout our history and also around the world. Different topics arose in this book which pertained directly to the views and ideas we reflected in our classroom. Davis speaks about previous liberation struggles, and many of the injustices we serve here in our own country, which have been a main topic of conversation throughout the history of our nation. Davis is an activist who is very expressive when it comes to her rhetoric about oppression and the exploitation of a set group of people.…
Iron Jawed Angels is a 2004 American drama film directed by Katja van Garnier and focuses on a group of suffragettes led by Alice Paul who argue for women’s rights. The movie begins as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns return to America from England and embark on a plan to legalize women’s right to vote, hampered by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The two women arrange a meeting with the chairman of NAWSA, Anna Howard Shaw, and try to push for a constitutional amendment allowing women to vote. However, Anna Shaw, being a more conservative woman, favors a more state-to-state approach. While at an art gallery, Alice Paul meets a woman named Inez Milholland and convinces her to support her cause.…
The Consequences of Gender on Freedom In antebellum America, a new genre of literature emerges as freed or escaped slaves begin to write about their experiences in bondage. In a time period of institutionalized slavery and general compliance to its role in society, people know and care little about the issues that slaves faced; but with the emergence of this new genre, general education on the lives of slaves begins to make an impact. The rise of the abolitionist movement is fueled by these accounts, and opens up discussion on many new topics about the legitimacy of slavery. One of the most notable writers of this time is Frederick Douglass, a former slave who became educated and wrote his account, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass,…
She embodies the struggles that all enslaved women have to endure. First, she is forced to maintain her rate of five hundred pounds of cotton every day or be punished while most men are unable to pick a mere three hundred pounds. Second, she is victimized by both her master and mistress. The master assaults her sexually and mercilessly. On the other hand, the mistress, instead of sympathizing with her plight as a fellow woman, subjects her to physical and psychological abuse (Stevenson 1).…