Blues for Mister Charlie

A young northerner boy, Emmett Till, was visiting family in the south and made a fresh comment to one of the white women in the town. This eventually led to his torture and death, by the hand of two white men in the town. Till wasn’t from the south and didn’t understand how strict the southerners were about not crossing the race boundary. This led to an investigation and later a long court case. The NAACP, a black organization, took a lot of interest in this case and so did the black press. They tried to keep the story going and light fires within the hearts of the black community. The case was finally closed and the two white men were found not guilty. This was just the beginning of many more acts of blacks standing up for their race and

The Emmett Till murder shined a light on the horrors of segregation and racism on the United States. Emmett Till, a young Chicago teenager, was visiting family in Mississippi during the month of August in 1955, but he was entering a state that was far more different than his hometown. Dominated by segregation, Mississippi enforced a strict leash on its African American population. After apparently flirting with a white woman, which was deeply frowned upon at this time in history, young Till was brutally murdered. Emmett Till’s murder became an icon for the Civil Rights Movement, and it helped start the demand of equal rights for all nationalities and races in the United States.

Baldwin uses the experiences he faced in New Jersey and the personal relationship with his father to show ethos throughout his essay. At one point in his essay, Baldwin finds himself in New Jersey where segregation still exist. “I learned in New Jersey…one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people” (68). Here Baldwin expresses how circumstances in New Jersey were like at the time, but also portrays the way people were viewed based on the color of their skin. Baldwin later goes on to mention the year he spent in New Jersey, was the year in which “[he] first contracted some dread, chronic disease” (70). This “disease” Baldwin contracted is not an actual disease, but more of a way in which he begins to feel and see the world around him differently. The disease Baldwin is referring to throughout his entire essay is bitterness. Living in New Jersey caused Baldwin to gain the sense of bitterness that his father had lived with during his life. Baldwin’s bitterness comes from the way he was specifically treated in New Jersey and how he allowed that feeling to affect his behaviors. Baldwin specifically mentions the moment in New Jersey where the white waitress approaches him at the restaurant stating, “We don’t serve Negroes here” (71). At this point we begin to see Baldwin as he acts out in violence by stating, “I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck

The idea of relating public and private events in Baldwin’s own experiences is instituted later in the essay in order to transition from narrative to analysis. Baldwin started telling a story about when he lived in New Jersey before the time of his father’s death. He talked about his personal treatment by white people in the south, a first hand account of the racism of that particular era. He learned of the hostility of the Jim Crow Laws inflicted on African Americans during that time period. His story was analogous to nearly all African Americans at that point. When Baldwin lived in New Jersey, he became exposed to the racism of the south that occurred in restaurants and diners. During one of those experiences he wrote, “I

The writer was a poor boy growing up. He was also a Negro, so things were bad for him and his family in white America. He probably felt sad every day of his childhood so he turned to books for entertainment and maybe escape. When he started reading, he found that he liked it and wanted to create stories for other people to enjoy, but he was a poor Negro boy who could not expect help from the whites, so he taught himself to write. That is similar to Sonny, who taught himself to play the piano.

The documentary, narrative "The Lynching of Emmett Till" by Christopher Metress, tells Emmett's story of death through various points of view. On August 24, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, entered a rural grocery store of Money, Mississippi. Because the young child had been gloating about his bond with white people up north, his southern cousins had dared him to go into the store and say something to the women working the register. Emmett accepted their challenge; seconds later he was at the counter, set on purchasing two items. What he did or said next will never be known for sure, but whatever passed between these two strangers from two different worlds set off a chain reaction that would forever

     Soon after Moody entered high school, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, was killed for whistling at a white woman. After hearing about the murder, Moody realized she really did not know much about what was going on around her. ?Before Emmett Till?s murder, I had known the fear of hunger hell and the Devil but now there was a new fear known to me ? the fear of being killed just because I was black.? Moody?s response to this was asking her high school teacher, Mrs. Rice, about Emmett?s murder and the NAACP.

In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" the symbolic motif of light and darkness illustrates the painful nature of reality the two characters face as well as the power gained through it. The darkness represents the actuality of life on the streets of the community of Harlem, where there is little escape from the reality of drugs and crime. The persistent nature of the streets lures adolescents to use drugs as a means of escaping the darkness of their lives. The main character, Sonny, a struggling jazz musician, finds himself addicted to heroin as a way of unleashing the creativity and artistic ability that lies within him. While using music as a way of creating a sort of structure in his life, Sonny attempts to step into the light, a life

Baldwin determines that violence and racial separatism are not acceptable solutions for achieving “power”. Baldwin believes that black people will only be able to achieve lasting influence in America if they love and accept white people. In contrast, writing 52 years after Baldwin, Coats tells his own son to “struggle” but not

Baldwin, however, describes his father as being a very black-like “African tribal chieftain” (64) who was proud of his heritage despite the chains it locked upon him. He is shown to be one with good intentions, but one who never achieved the positive outcome intended. His ultimate downfall was his paranoia such that “the disease of his mind allowed the disease of his body to destroy him” (66). Baldwin relates the story of a white teacher with good intentions and his father’s objection to her involvement in their lives because of his lack of trust for any white woman. His father’s paranoia even extended to Baldwin’s white high school friends. These friends, although they could be kind, “would do anything to keep a Negro down” (68), and they believed that the “best thing to do was to have as little to do with them as possible” (68). Thus, Baldwin leaves the reader with the image of his father as an unreasonable man who struggled to blockade white America from his life and the lives of his children to the greatest extent of his power. Baldwin then turns his story to focus on his own experience in the world his father loathed and on his realization that he was very much like his father.

James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues is a short story focused around the narration of Sonny’s brother. The narrator in the case of Sonny’s Blues is the most important character in a cast of characters not only because he is the narrator, but due to the dynamic change of his character we see at the end of the story. Baldwin effectively uses the first-person narration of Sonny’s brother in order to convey the theme of communication. Throughout the entire story of Sonny’s Blues, the narrator and his brother interact through exchanging words countless times. The question posed is whether or not the narrator can truly hear what his brother is saying to him.

On August 28th, 1955. A young, African American, fourteen year old boy, Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till, was murdered in Money, Mississippi after flirting with a white woman (“Emmett Till”, 2014). Emmett Till’s story brought attention to the racism still prevalent in the south in 1955, even after attempts nationwide to desegregate and become equal. Emmett’s harsh murder and unfair trial brought light into the darkness and inequality that dominated the south during the civil rights movement. Emmett’s life was proof that African American’s were equal to whites and that all people were capable of becoming educated and successful even through difficulties. Emmett’s death had an even greater impact, providing a story and a face to the unfair treatment

Society has not always been fair with the treatment towards African Americans. There has been a constant negative impact placed on African Americans self-esteem, where it is hard to maintain a positive identity because they lived in a white society. African Americans have to struggle to either attain or maintain a sense of self-respect. James Baldwin in Blues for Mister Charlie depicts a character that battles with his self-esteem in such ways, stated previously named Richard Henry. Richard Henry was a strong willed young man, who thought highly of himself, and did not allow others to make him feel less. Roy Bannister presents a schematic in which details the choice path of threatened egotism, in the characters case his threatened egotism would lead to aggression or violence.

In “Going to Meet the Man” by James Baldwin the reader opens up with a scene that is considered one of the most horrific torture and murder scenes in history; or of the 1940’s. The story is so graphic that it takes you away from the main idea of racism, hatred and murder. Nevertheless, the theme of the story is a transformation of a young child into a stereotypical Black Southern-American hating bigot. Through dramatic detail Baldwin explains the mindset of a white southern police officer and how he came to hate Black-Americans. This was representative of the racial, violent black South because this exemplified what happens to most white-Americans and how they are brained washed unknowingly to hate anyone that does not resemble the same

The production spearheaded with a solemn poem by Langston Hughes entitled "Harlem." Preparing for an emotionally empowering theater piece, the poem quieted the audience and placed a serious blanket over us. While appropriate for me, I found it extremely coincidental that the poem's title, ties in directly with James Baldwin and his extensive writings on the 1943 Harlem race riots. With the lights off and just a solitary voice reciting the poem, it gave us, the audience, an immediate notion of play's melancholy style.