Essay On African American Travel

African American Studies is a very complex subject. To confuse African American studies with black history is a common occurrence. African American studies is much deeper and more profound than just Black history alone. There are many unanswered and unasked questions among the Black American culture which causes confusion and misunderstanding in modern day society. In unit one there were many themes, concepts, and significant issues in the discipline of Africana studies. Both W.E.B Du Bois and Vivian V. Gordan touched on many concerns.

Imagine sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to a new world, a place that a person has only ever heard about and all of it’s great opportunities. Now imagine sailing the same ocean, only to be unsure if your life will be worsened or not. Bradford’s detailed narrative of “Of Plymouth Plantation” and Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography of his experiences as a slave in “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano” are both oddly similar, but extremely different. In this essay, I will be viewing the similarities and differences between these two narratives with the topics of their coming to America story and their writing style and purpose.

The Interesting Narrative conveys the first-hand experiences of an African who is stripped of the basic rights given to humans and is forced into slavery, while at the same this individual fights for freedom. This autobiography is a reliable source for historians, educators, and students. After analyzing the literature, I concluded that the autobiography’s main criteria included content, tone, perspective, and the structure of his writing. The authors ability to manipulate this criterion, allows for the successful creation of an environment that builds a connection between the audience and his journey.

This time in the post World War II era, many African Americans had began to become a more urbanized center of population, around 1970. (Inmotionaame, pg. 1) The regular population included about 70 percent of just the natural population to live in more urbanized cities. (Inmotionaame, pg. 1) Soon African Americans dominated, having 80 percent of their community to live and take the same benefits in more urbanized centers of the Unites States. (Inmotionaame, pg. 2) Only about 53 percent of African Americans and others who seemed to migrate stayed in the same area around the South. (Inmotionaame, pg. 2)

One can say that we live in a country that under the constitution states that there is justice for all citizens, we are all granted equal protection under the law, and we have equality for all; but yet people are still fighting for equality. Blacks are being victimized by the system that causes them to be treated unfairly by the police which leads then to dealing with discriminatory sentencings for small crimes, and they would forever live in this vicious cycle that was created to put Blacks away. There are many laws, policies, and legislations that are set in place to keep certain groups of people oppressed without even openly stating which group of people would be oppressed. Race and crime, as two significant social phenomena, are

Writing is really important to make our voices heard and it also can be use as a source to express ourselves, especially if we do not have much freedom to do it orally. Readings such as daily newspapers have really large audiences and it also can be use as the ‘vehicle’ to deliver our thoughts and make sure people hear our opinions or things that we want to deliver. Based on a reading with a title “Broadening Representational Boundaries”, written by Rooks, we can see that the first black women millionaire in America, Madam CJ Walker, also authored numerous articles about her life and her business empire to be issued in various news sources around the country (76-95). Madam CJ Walker is not the only person who wrote her own stories to make her voices heard. There are many other public figures that also writing stories about themselves, such as Booker T. Washington who wrote “Up from slavery” and Du Bois’s who wrote “The Souls of Black Folk.”

My idea of slavery is, that it is one of the blackest, the wickedest things everywhere in the world. When you tell them the truth, they whip you to make you lie. I have taken more lashes for this, than for any other thing, because I would not lie.One day I set the table, and forgot to put on the carving-fork - the knife was there. I went to the table to put it on a plate. My master said, - "Where is the fork?" I told him "I forgot it." He says, - "You d - d black b - , I'll forget you!" - at the same time hitting me on the head with the carving knife. The blood spurted out - you can see. (Here the woman removed her turban and showed a circular cicatrices denuded of hair, about an inch in diameter, on the top of her head.) My mistress took me into the kitchen and put on camphor, but she could not stop the bleeding. A doctor was sent for. He came but asked no questions. I was frequently punished with raw hides - was hit with tongs and poker and anything. I used when I went out, to look up at the sky, and say, "Blessed Lord, oh, do take me out of this!" It seemed to me I could not bear another lick. I can't forget it. I sometimes dream that I am pursued, and when I wake, I am scared almost to death.{Benjamin Drew was a Boston abolitionist who

Throughout the eighteenth century, many fugitive slaves wrote narratives to express their experience as a slave. Fredrick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, an American Slave and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are two famous examples in which the writers demonstrate their perspective as slaves and dangerous, agonizing life. Nevertheless, there are also many dissimilarities between these narratives, including gender based treatments, main character’s first steps towards freedom, and main character’s personality.

Octavia E. Butler is the most prominent African-American female author in the genre of science fiction and topics related to the African-American experience in the US recur in several of her novels. (McEntee 139-141) According to Mickle, “Butler's emphasis on slavery and its cultural implications (the mixing of cultures and races) predominates” her work. “Her characters try to free themselves from some system of bondage” which “situates her firmly in the African American literary tradition, (…) infused with the racial memories of slavery.” (60) In Parable of the Sower, the theme of slavery is employed in two different ways. Firstly, the journey Lauren Olamina and her fellow travelers take to the North mirrors

Throughout the abolition movement, both men and women slaves were trying to escape from slavery, and find their way to freedom in the North. Many wrote their stories down. Some with the aid of ghost writers, and often under pseudonyms to protect their safety. These personal narratives spoke of the sufferings and horrors of the slave experience in America. However, since black men and black woman experienced slavery differently, they wrote about them differently. Those differences can be seen in a comparison of Frederick Douglass’s, Narrative of the Life of Frederick

The emancipation of the African slave who was now disconnected from their traditions and way of life after nearly 300 years, is seemingly a great gush from the dam to the ebbs and flows of the struggle. The end of slavery as we know it, presented a ball of mixed emotions among the nation; North and SOUTH. Some slaves were grossly ecstatic to be free. For example, when a slave girl named Caddy, from Goodman, Mississippi found she was free, went to her mistress, flipped up her dress and told her "Kiss my ass!" On the contrary, some slaves were apprehensive of being free. For example, one elderly slave woman reportedly said, "I ain' no free nigger! I is got a marster

The main reasons for African Americans migrating to the north was to establish a better life both through economic and social means. Jobs in the north for men proved to be worth the travel and separation from their families because the jobs provided versatility and increase profits. “The arriving southern blacks wanted the vacant jobs and the wages they paid that were two or three times higher than daily earnings in the South. As news of job openings and comparatively high wages spread through southern communities, African-Americans expressed an eagerness to reach Pittsburgh and to learn more about conditions there.” (Gottlieb, p. 139). As intended the job market and demand for African American works met and exceeded the expectation of the migrants coming from the South. Aside from the jobs offered to migrate men, all other expectation fall short of their imagination. The living condition were extremely costly and the homes were not in great shape. Not only was the living situation not up to expectation but the cost of food, clothing, insurance and membership dues to the churches and organizations didn’t leave much from the new “well” paying jobs. Many migrators felt they may be better off back down south where they could reduce their cost. “The migrants had moved north with high expectations, but the real world they

Passed down from generation to generation, oral tradition predominates as one of the most significant sources in discovering the history of the African diaspora. Plagued by illiteracy, the tangible text of the past remain useless for both the freed man and slave, this heightens the use of spoken word to elicit the events of themselves and their ancestors. Through the American Folklore Center, the stories that George Johnson convey, take form. Interviewed in 1940, George Johnson, a former slave from Brierfield, Virginia, recalls the tales of his own enslavement as well as the stories he passed down from his father and grandfather. However, his strictly progressive rendition of his place in North American slavery not only question the accuracy

The introductory line of Harriet Jacob’s preface to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction”, is short yet serving (Jacobs 224). Although brief in its nature, this statement manages to encompass two major aspects that characterize African-American literature: audience and truth. In all writing, understanding the target audience and how to arrange an argument or essay to appeal to that specific crowd is paramount. However, it is especially important for African-American authors, who typically need to expose injustices or call for social change in their works. In particular, two African-American authors who understood their audience and how to manipulate that understanding were Charles W. Chesnutt and Marcus Garvey. Although they were born only twenty-nine years apart, Chesnutt and Garvey technically wrote for different time periods. While Chesnutt’s work is associated with “Literature of the Reconstruction”, Garvey was grouped with authors and activists from the Harlem Renaissance (Gates and Smith 580 ). The separation of their literary epochs drove Chesnutt and Garvey to write for contradistinctive audiences that demanded unique written techniques and rhetorical strategies, but that both asked for utmost honesty.

During the slavery period a number of African slaves wrote stories, and poems about their daily hardships that they had to withhold by being a slave and everything else that happen throughout their life’s. Not many Black writers had the resources or support from their owners to publish what they wrote or anyone to care about what they wrote, lucky slaves did reach success when they published their work. Knowing where they came from or where they grew up from is important, the type of work that each individual accomplished when they published their work to the public. The massive impact that Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln had in the black community and how they helped change the way they were being treated completely.