Long Walk Home Sociology

The setting is a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The event happened in1955. The characters are Mr. Joe Singleton,, Rev. Scott, Miss Louise Bennett, Jacob & Junie ( fraternal twins, fourteen) and Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress, a symbol of knitting the difficult with the beautiful; intertwining a private experience with a history of racism and injustice. As a seamstress, she is represented by these words: “fabric, thread, collars, hems, buttonholes; bias, pins, cut; pieced & sewn; stitch, pants, shirts, socks and shirts, darned; well-made, well-sewn clothes; pressed sleeve; a thimble ( a symbol if protection), hem, … pins, parted lips, stitch, clenched teeth”. The bus and the door are symbolic; both are referential to the segregation practices exercised everywhere. The driver “drives off”, “pulls off” and “puts off. The door is “open” to the white and colored riders; however, colored people, who are paid-in-full-customers, are denied equal access to the bus. Verbs such as: “get off”, “walk”, “reboard”, “push” and “repeat”

The film has several ethnicities within a small area along a time line of one day. The film has many, informative methods in which it describe the various diversity issues of all the characters within the movie. For example, Sal’s pizzeria which is owned by an Italian American has pictures of famous Italian Americans on the wall and plays Italian music. One character named Buggin Out is always upset. Bugging out hates the fact that there are no black people pictures on the wall especially since the pizzeria is in a black neighborhood. His perspective represents the people in the African American community that always protest, but usually don’t work to improve the community. The

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, one of the leaders of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] refused to give up her seat to a white person on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, despite being reprimanded by the driver (Schulke 166). Montgomery, Alabama was known for its terrible treatment of blacks. The buses in particular had been a source of tension between the city and black citizens for many years (Schulke, 167). As a result of refusing to give up her seat, Rosa Parks was arrested. Rosa Parks' popularity among the black community, proved to be the spark that ignited the non-violent Civil Rights Movement (Norrell 2).

I saw racism in the movie for example when the cops target a Suv because they saw a colored couple, but when a white coupled pass by they don’t stop them or anything. The cop takes advantage of the colored girl because the cops are white and know they

According to Henslin, racism is “prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race.” Racism is woven throughout the documentary of Lafeyette and Pharoah’s lives at the Horner Homes. All of the African Americans living in inner-city Chicago are looked down upon by the whites every day. The whites pay no attention to the existence of the lives of these people. The gangs run the streets of the inner-city

On Thursday evening December 1, 1955, Rosa boards a Montgomery City Bus to go home after a long day working as a seamstress. She walks back to the section for blacks, and takes a seat. The law stated that they could sit there if no White people were standing. Rosa parks never liked segregation rules and has been fighting against them for more than ten years in the NAACP, but until then had never broke any of the unjust rules. As the bus stops at more places, more white people enter the bus, all the seats in the “White Only” section was filled and the bus driver orders Rosa’s row to move to the back of the bus, they all moved, accept Rosa. She was arrested and fined for violating a city regulation. This act of defiance began a movement that ended legal Segregation in America, and made her an inspiration to freedom devoted people everywhere.

The motion picture begins with a riot after a white storeowner slaughters a dark young person. This episode underscores the

An example of racism occurred at the beginning of the film when the Arab looking father and daughter attempted to buy a gun. The clerk at the gun shop made a few blatantly racist comments about the customers because he assumes they are Middle Eastern. There were several references to the September 11 attacks. It didn’t matter that the two were Persian, not Arab. Unfortunately, the reoccurring theme post 9/11 is that all Middle Eastern people became potential terrorists. It is amazing that people have the ability to interpret bad events and cast their own prejudices on different ethnic groups to mask their own feelings of anger and frustration.

The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement Rosa Parks is one of the most famous people in the history of the American Civil Rights movement, for her refusal to “move to the back of the bus” on December 1, 1955. Although her moment of protest was not a planned event , it certainly proved to be a momentous one. The nature of Rosa Park’s protest, the response of the authorities of Montgomery, the tactics adopted by the civil rights leaders in Montgomery, and the role eventually played by Federal authority, were all aspects of this particular situation that were to be repeated again and again in the struggle for equality of race. Rosa Parks’ action, and the complex combination of events that followed, in some measure, foreshadowed a great deal of

The degree of connection between all of the characters in the movie is so coincidental and interrelated to emphasize the point that we do not always know what is going on with everyone else we may encounter. It also accentuates the fact that racism is not one particular race against another. It also shows that we never know someone’s situation and what is happening in their life to make them act the way that they do if

What I also found to be quite interesting and perhaps a weakness of the film, was the sense of performative racism that four of the main white characters utilize and how the makers of the film appeal to such a phenomenon through symbolisms as well. In the movie, there seems to be two main kinds of racism the characters exhibit, one of them being blatant racism and another being subtle racism through microaggressions. For example, Katherine experiences blatantly racist and misogynistic behavior from her coworkers, especially from Paul Stafford, the lead engineer (making groupthink much easier) and Ruth, the only other woman working in the office. On the other hand, Al Harrison and John Glenn appeal to the subtler sides of racism and performative white pity, Glenn going out of his way to shake the hands of the computers as the film attempted to paint a positive, “not-all-whites” picture of inclusion, acceptance and tolerance, a kind of racism that almost all of the white people in the film come to, by its end. Examples of this can be seen in scenes like the one in which Al Harrison smashes down the “coloreds” and “whites” restroom signs as if implying that doing so will abolish all racial inequalities with a couple of blows of blunt force. One could infer it seems, that paired with the groundbreaking stories of these three women, white people being decent human

The reason many people in America today, as well as in the movie are racist is because this is how they were brought up, by the labels they were taught to live by. Past generations were exposed to segregation between ethnic groups, which has greatly carried on to how people look at others today. Up until 1967 it was prohibited for blacks to marry white people in 38 states

This movie continues to show all different types of racism. In one scene, two black men were walking down the street complaining of how everyone is so racist. The district attorney, Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser), and his wife, Jean Cabot (Sandra Bullock), were walking down the street. She was holding his arm and started to hold him closer because she was cold. The two black men saw her and assumed that she was scared as they walked by them. Later on, the two black men steel a SUV at gun point. The passengers of the SUV just happen to

A scene in the movie that best depicted the racism and the violence was the scene outside the Little’s family house, a black family. In this scene the black legion starts to pass around gasoline cans and then flames roar through the room and the Little kids are hysterical. Louise, the wife, rushes in and pushes them past the fire, she has infant in hand covered in a blanket. They barely make it outside when they are confronted by a black legion member who threatens them and tells them to leave the community.

In the 1950s, it was customary for those of colour to sit at the back of the bus or to give up their seats for white people, as those with lighter skin were seen as higher status and more deserving of a seat. This suppression of the coloured reached a tipping point in early December of 1955, when Rosa Parks, a black lady, refused to give up her seat for a white man. This was the breaking point for many people, as it lead to the temporary imprisonment of Rosa Parks and the complete boycott of the use of buses by the African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama. The plot of the movie The Long Walk Home centers around this boycott. Odessa Cotter was a black maid for the Thompson family during this boycott; she lacked a vehicle but was still expected to come to work, so she walked. This fatigued Odessa to the point of not being able to perform her responsibilities properly so that Miriam Thompson–– without her husband’s knowledge––agrees to drive Odessa twice a week to work to help ease this burden. This starts out as an act of service to help herself but as time continues Miriam comes to understand the unfairness of what was going on despite the common