Essay on Rubin Hurricane Carter: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Richard did not understand until later that the black community discouraged his rebellious ways because following the expectations of whites was a way to ensure survival of the community. A rebellious act of one black not only put his or her life in danger, but also his or her family and the entire black community. Richard’s need to conform to the rules of the white society for survival and his need to rebel in order to achieve his humanity and individuality was a tension that infested him daily.

In the book Black Boy by Richard Wright, Wright details his life as a black child in segregated America. He also writes about the abuse he faced as a child from the hands of his family. They would often beat him without telling him why, leaving the young boy terrified of doing wrong. At one point, his mother almost beat him to death at four years old (Wright 7). All in all, this abuse had a huge affect on Richard’s personality and actions as he matured. As he ages, Richard begins to develop the tendency to isolate himself from the rest of the world. It worsens as he ages, but from a very young age he begins this habit. One can argue that this habit may have just been a natural part of his personality, but one can not ignore the role his abuse

“What is a rebel? A man who says no.” (Albert Camus, The Rebel) Black Boy is more than a mere autobiography, dealing with a man during the time of Jim Crow laws. Indeed, though the book is generally advertised as such, the greater theme here is not of the black man versus the white; it is of Richard’s fight against adversity, and the prevalent and constraining attitudes of not just his time, or the “White South”, but of the attitude of conformity throughout all time. Richard develops from birth to become a nonconformist; a rebel, and we can see this attitude throughout his whole life. As a child, he refuses to simply follow orders if they make no sense to him; for this, he is lashed repeatedly. As he grows older, he begins

Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest hurricanes ever to hit the United States. Hurricane Katrina started out as any other hurricane, as the result of warm moisture and air from the oceans surface that built into storm clouds and pushed around by strong forceful winds until it became a powerful storm. Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005 and crossed southern Florida as a moderate Category 1 hurricane, causing some deaths and flooding there before strengthening rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico. The hurricane strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane over the warm Gulf water, but weakened before making its second landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on the morning of Monday, August 29 in southeast

All their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine…. With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny…. Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.

Robert Davis was a retired elementary school teacher (Pace, G. 2005). The incident took place in 2005, he was then sixty-four (Pace, G. 2005). He had returned to New Orleans to simply check on a relative’s property after Hurricane Katrina hit (Pace, G. 2005). He would later be arrested and brutally beaten on suspicion of intoxication (Victim, 2005). Conversely, Davis would later testify he was not intoxicated (Pace,

O.J. Simpson, born Orenthal James Simpson, was an exceptional football running back from 1969-1980. After retirement from football, Simpson became a sports newscaster, as well as continued as a “B” rate actor. Although he was a black man, he was accepted due to his accumulated wealth, as an elite white man. He married a beautiful white woman with flowing blonde hair, Nicole Brown. He had two children with Brown-Simpson and appeared to be living happily in Brentwood, California. Simpson was accused of domestic battery multiple times by his wife, which ultimately led to the dissolution of their marriage. On June 13, 2004 Brown-Simpson, as well as a male acquaintance, was found murdered outside of her home in Brentwood. Suddenly, the cameras were trained on Simpson, not for a feat in the game of football, not for a sports analysis, and not for an orange juice or car rental commercial; rather he is the main suspect in the death of Brown-Simpson and Ronald Goldman, both of whom are white. In this paper I will argue, that O.J. Simpson’s socio-economic status afforded him, or his legal team, the opportunity to change the color of his skin when it benefitted him.

"If a white man defaulted, it was an individual defection; if a colored man failed, the whole race was at fault." (p. 138) Robert was shot in the head during the war and the injury contributed to his blindness later in life. Even so, he was denied his request for a pension because of race. Robert was very focused on educating his children into becoming outstanding members of both the black and white communities to promote a positive reflection on the black community. Robert’s struggle to secure an identity for himself and his children underlines the social discrepancies that define this

Through many of these traumatizing struggles she faced, she was persistent, and did not let anything that was done to her get in the way of herself, she kept pursuing and used the negative actions of others as a motive to keep pushing forward, developing in “the first African American billionaire.” The fact that the writer uses “poverty” and “billionaire” in the same sentence when talking about an individual, speculates how Oprah’s determination made her whom she is today. Furthermore, in Black boy, Wright speculates Richard’s determination by saying,“And no word that I had ever heard fall from the lips of southern white men had ever made me really doubt the worth of my own humanity” (283).Richard here reveals how he is a determined individual. He employs the idea of how he neglects every other’s criticism and thoughts. He reveals how he knows his worth when expressing how the words of others never made him “doubt” himself. Richard blocks negativity out of his life and is tenacious about following what is best for his future, he obviously does not let anyone influence him and knows what is best for his “own humanity”.The fact that he has several white racist men criticizing him, telling him what to do, scorning at him, really critiques how much of a persistent individual he is, and how driven he is to get to the North and get out of his

Hurricane Katrina hit the southern coast of the United States on August 28, 2005. The center of Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on the morning of August 29, 2005. The devastating effect of this hurricane resulted in more than 1,800 citizens losing their lives, as well as more than an estimated $81 billion dollars in damages occurred. By August 31, 2005, eighty-percent of the city became submerged under water because the storm surge breached the city's levees at multiple points. If the levees are damaged massive water will flood Louisiana from the Gulf Coast, the Mississippi River, and other surrounding bodies of water. Some areas of New Orleans were 15 feet under water. Winds of Hurricane Katrina reached an astounding category 3 as

“That one has a jail-cell with his name on it”, (Ferguson 1). A quote this powerful lays a foundation of the stories shared within the book Bad Boys.  This book allows us to see how the public school system is shaping black masculinity, and the affect it brings on these young boys.Yet, in the book The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, it tells us about  Robert’s struggle from poverty, the streets of Newark, and his education at Yale. These two books give us a powerful message. One that allows us to see the underlying triumphs Black men face. With poverty, biases, prejudices, and many more obstacles thrown in their path, they will always be set to prove themselves. The odds are constantly against them, as they are seen and viewed as

So, Mr. Griffin had a multistage process done on his body so that the pigment of his skin would appear darker. After many treatments of ultraviolet light and tablet pills, Mr. Griffin had become a black man. After Mr. Griffin’s transformation was complete, he immersed himself into the black community. Mr. Griffin was not prepared for what would happen to him once in the black life. While Mr. Griffin traveled to different places in the south he met numerous people, both black and white. Some people were friendly while others were quite hostile.

The racist police officer had it set in his mind that Rubin Carter was a menace to society and he was going to do everything in his power to take him down. These things that Rubin was saying even made the cop want to put him away more. So the first chance he could get something on him he would. So it happened and the cop tried to pin a murder on Rubin Carter and another black man that was with him at the time of the murder. There was an instance that we saw an instance of stereotyping by other cops in that district. When they were out looking for the murderers they were told to look for two black men in a white car. When Carter was approached in his car he was told by

“Here comes the story of the Hurricane”-Rubin Carter—the boxer, the man—who had justice stacked against him (Dylan, Bob). The question: What is justice? According to whose point of view? In the 1960s, were blacks treated fairly? Case in point—Rubin “Hurricane” Carter who was finally released from jail after 19 years of being wrongfully imprisoned for a crime he never committed.

He saw how his father become invisible to the injustice of black around him and he decided to get involved. He had a generativity concern on improving black people rights in the world around him (Newman & Newman, 2015). As a young boy, he would watch TV, read articles, and read books regarding what people are doing to change the way blacks are treated. His father would be disappointed and hope he would just stay away for the violence, abuse, and other activist groups. After high school, he went on to Fisk University to be involve in the Freeman Riders and later the Black Panthers. Along the journey, he was kicked, spit on, arrested, and even witness brutal killings and prayed that he would not be killed for his rights.