The Marrow Tradition By Charles Waddell Chestnut

Based on historical events, Charles Chestnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, gives human details to produce a vivid picture of life in the south after the failure of reconstruction. His work has many underlying themes among which are the use of the press to stir already volatile emotions through propaganda, class structure not only along color lines but within races, and the effects of the white supremacists’ agenda on the integrity of those who claimed to be morally advanced. Through this story, Chesnutt allows the reader to enter the minds of the characters to show how change will not take place until both whites and blacks detach themselves from traditions that seem to be engraved on their

There are several points of similarities and differences found within Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham jail" and Amata Miller's "The many faces of social justice". One can interpret both of these essays as literature promoting equality and ending issues of racism. However, a thorough analysis of each work indicates that both authors advocate a difference approach in achieving what are similar ends. An examination of the author's respective works indicates that Miller's methodology is more applicable to the author than King's is.

King transcends both the context of present struggle and his listeners. Unlike them, he mk understands the historical situation… he instructs them in the grand strategy of the mmmp Birmingham movement, just as any kindly teacher might attempt to cure the ignorance mmm and elevate the understanding of novice students (Osborn 28). Martin Luther King, Jr. is an expert on the struggle and obviously had the best intentions of his readers in mind while writing. This makes him both reliable and personally involved in spreading the campaign. In his “Letter,” Mr. King refuses to be put in a box, despite the location of his composition. He represents himself as a moral compass; righteous without being arrogant. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s tone and expression are an extravagant part of the letter’s ‘persuasive appeal’ (Leff, Utley 39). Mr. King himself plays an impressive part in making “Letter From Birmingham Jail” extremely effective.

In this book, all of the characters have a similar heritage, or ancestry. Their ancestors are African and follow Animism, a traditional African religion. The characters either want to accept or forget their pasts and want to move ahead or stay where they are in life. Boy Willie and Avery want to put their pasts behind and move on to making a mark in society. Berniece wants to remember and incorporate her past, which eventually lets her in succeeding this argument over the piano. Each character has a different vision of the American Dream.

“The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South” by John W. Blassingame is the first book about slavery written by a historian in the viewpoint of slaves rather than slave owners. This book analyzes the experience of slaves in the South during misjudgement and confusion. Blassingame targets the different aspects that have influenced the slaves life and the way they lived it. Blassingame writes this book to encounter you in feeling the pain of the slaves but also how they had their own traditions and culture while enslaved.

In Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice: A saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, the author creates a way to describe the discrimination and horrible racial treatment inflicted on the African American community following the civil war and continuing into the 1900’s by following a black doctor’s life and his controversy in equality. The author sets the scene in the booming city of Detroit, a place many blacks ventured to when trying to escape the cruelty Jim Crow Laws forced upon many African Americans. The great migration of blacks fleeing to Detroit in search of a new life brought an increase of over seventy thousand people in just the short span of fifteen years. This sudden unwanted abundance of people, still disliked even in the North, lead to a city full of racial prejudices and unjust discrimination.

In the book titled The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, author John Blassingame’s theme, focused on the history of African slave experience throughout the American South. After much research, the author said in the preface that most historians focused more on the planter instead of the slave. He also pointed out that most of the research on slaves by previous historians was based on stereotypes, and do not tell the real history of slave life and a slave’s inner self. Most of these historians, who focused on antebellum southern history, left out the African-American slave experience on purpose. Through much gathering of research, Blassingame hoped to correct this injustice to the history of African-American slaves, and show how slavery affected slaves, but also American life, culture, and thought.

In The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt uses the ideas of character doubles to represent the idea of race vs respect. By creating these doubles he creates a theme of duality throughout the book that reflects upon the racism during the time period the book is written about. Chesnutt insinuates the idea of race versus respect in a dualital manner that compliments each character's respective differences while still showing the reader exactly why each pair of character foils are two sides of the same coin through various examples throughout the book, such as Tom and Ellis, and Olivia and Janet. An example of race vs. respect given in the book was the relation of Tom Delamere and Lee Ellis. Both of these characters are white men, but the way they treat

Although Douglass and Jacobs' experiences support the "personal as political', their narratives further explore the residual effects of slavery: 1) to prohibit the identity of male and female slave, and 2) to marginalize the slave's presence in society.

William Miller is a name not known to many people, unless you are an Adventist. If you are an Adventist, then you have probably heard his name multiple times. William Miller did not always believe the right things about God, though. In fact, he would make fun of those who believed in a God who cares about human life. The events in William Miller's life tell a great story of how God can change a hard heart.

The book, The Spirituals and the Blues, by James H. Cone, illustrates how the slave spirituals and the blues reflected the struggle for black survival under the harsh reality of slavery and segregation. The spirituals are historical songs which speak out about the rupture of black lives in a religious sense, telling us about people in a land of bondage, and what they did to stay united and somehow fight back. The blues are somewhat different from in the spirituals in that they depict the secular aspect of black life during times of oppression and the capacity to survive. James H. Cone’s portrayal of how the spirituals and the blues aided blacks through times of hardship and adversity

The controversy of racism scorches Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass written by Frederick Douglass himself. Douglass unveils the atrocious truth about slavery that was hidden for so many years. Every beating, every death, every malicious act was all recorded for the people of the U.S. to finally see the error of our ways. The short essay, Slavery as a Mythologized Institution, explains how people in that time period justified the disgusting behavior that was demonstrated regularly. Religion and intellectual inferiority were concepts that were used to manipulate the minds of everyone around into believing that practicing slavery was acceptable. However a very courageous man, Frederick Douglass challenges those beliefs. Douglass debunks the mythology of slavery in his narrative by rebuking the romantic image of slavery with very disturbing imagery, promotes his own views on the intellectual belief of slaves, and exposes the “system” for promoting the disloyalty among slaves.

Booker T. Washington was one of the most well-known African American educators of all time. Lessons from his life recordings and novelistic writings are still being talked and learned about today. His ideas of the accommodation of the Negro people and the instillation of a good work ethic into every student are opposed, though, by some well-known critics of both past and current times. They state their cases by claiming the Negro’s should not have stayed quiet and worked their way to wear they did, they should have demanded equal treatment from the southern whites and claimed what was previously promised to them. Also, they state that Washington did not really care about equality or respect, but about a status boost in his own life. Both

The story, for the most part, centers upon an African-American family, their dreams for the future and an insurance check coming in for death of the eldest man. Stirring into the mix later is the hugely oppressive,

Like Douglass, Jacobs also exposed the harsh treatment towards slaves while proving that American “blacks could succeed at the same activities as whites” (Hunter-Willis 26) through her own narrated experiences. Her resolve to write demonstrated a “resistance to the patriarchal system of slavery” (Peterson 158) by sharing the exploits of slavery through her own point of view.