Problems of race discrimination of the USA in the XX century
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Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895). It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. He was a firm believer in the equality of all people, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was fond of saying, "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong. "
Harriet A. Jacobs (Linda Brent) (1813-1897) ran away from slavery to make a new life for herself in the North; the story of her life under slavery, her protracted flight towards freedom, and the conditions she found once she got there, make up the structure of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Today, it is regarded as the most in-depth and textured pre-Civil War slave narrative written by a black woman in America.
Booker Washington (1856-1915) between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I, no one exercised more influence over race relations in the United States than did Booker T. Washington; some contemporary historians of the African American experience in America call the period the Era of Booker T. Washington. His influence continues to th present day. He wanted to help African Americans enter mainstream white society with the least possible violence and thus advocated an educational program of vocational rather than intellectual or professional training. His works have been contrasted with the dynamic and militant efforts of Frederick Douglass and the intellectual and professional initiatives of the fiercely independent W. E. B. Du Bois, but Washington was able to institutionalize his power to a far greater degree than either of these two. He owed no small part of his power to extraordinary skill with written and spoken language. To his sense of calling Washington added the command of memory and the detail of living as a racial other, all of which he expressed in an unforgettable voice.his brilliant autobiography, Up from Slavery" (1901), a masterpiece of the genre that was widely praised in the United States and popular in translation around the world. The early chapters reveal the physical and psychological realities of Washingtons origins, realities that were shared by so many millions of the slaves set free" at the conclusion of the Civil War. Later chapters show Washington at the peak of his success as an African American spokesperson, particularly as a master of rhetoric that allowed him to appear both as sincerely humble and as force to be reckoned with, both as a man of selfless industry and as one of considerable political know-how.his works he urges African Americans to emulate the proverbial ship captain who urged his crew to cast down your buckets where you are" even though they were still at sea, and who thus found fresh water at the mouth of a river. He argued that by seeking improvement African Americans would inevitably rise as individuals. Yet he also urged whites not to judge African American children against white children until they had had a chance to catch up in school. In short, Washington proposed a middle ground wherein African Americans would rise themselves by individual effort and white Americans would appreciate the efforts being made and judge accordingly. Up from slavery is as important as a literary production as it is a record of time, place, and person. Washingtons skillful use of metaphor and symbol, his deftly masked ironies, and the art of his artlessness have been addressed by such critics as William Andrews, Houston A. Baker, and James M. Cox.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) in his major work The Philadelphia Negro, that expressed the steady stream of important studies of African American life. Dedicated to the rigorous, scholarly examination of the so-called Negro Problem, Du Bois had to face up to the violent realities of the lives he proposed to study. He first came to national attention with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), characterized by scholar Eric J. Sundquist as the preeminent text of African American cultural consciousness.chapters explore the implications of this extraordinary books dramatic and prophetic announcement in its Forethought that the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line. In the first chapter, Of Our Spiritual Strivings, Du Bois introduces another concept that would inform his thinking for the rest of his career-the notion of the twoness of African Americans: One ever feels his twoness, Du Bois asserts, an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. This foundational observation hit on what Du Bois named double-consciousness. In his essay The Negro Problem" (1903), he meant college-educated African Americans who could provide leadership for African Americans after Reconstruction. Du Bois offers a concise overview of the Negro in America cast in the highly charged rhetoric of the orator who wishes to move as well as inform his audience. Du Bois became a leader in the Niagara Movement (1905), a movement aggressively demanding for African Americans the same civil rights enjoyed by white Americans.1910 Du Bois served as an editor of Crisis, the official publication of the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization he helped to create. Through this publication Du Bois reached an increasingly large audience-one hundred thousand by 1919-with powerful messages that argued the need for black development and white social enlightenment. From 1920 Du Bois shifted his attention from the reform of race relations in America through research and political legislation to the search for longer-range worldwide economic solutions to the international problems of inequity among the races. He began a steady movement toward Pan-African and socialist perspectives that led to his joining the US Communist Party in 1961 and, in the year of his death, becoming a citizen of Ghana. He was extremely active as a politician, organizer, and diplomat, and he continued as a powerful writer of poetry, fiction, autobiography, essays, and scholarly works. Martin Luther King spoke of Du Bois as one of the most remarkable men of our time.distinguished and most popular writer Langston Hughes (1902-1967) captured the dominant and improvisatory traditions of black culture in written form. Eleven of his poems were published in Alain Lockes pioneering anthology, The New Negro (1925), and he also well represented in Countee Gullens 1927 anthology, Caroling Dusk. Carl Van Vechten, one of the white patrons of African American writing, helped get The Weary Blues, Hughes first volume of poems, published in 1926.this year, his important essay The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain appeared in the Nation, he described the immense challenges to be faced by the serious black artist who would produce a racial art" but insisted on the need for courageous artists to make the attempt. The publication of his novel Not without Laughter in 1930 glorified his reputation and sales, enabling him to support himself. By the 1930s he was being called the bard of Harlem.and other blacks were drawn by the American Communist Party, which made racial justice an important plank in its platform, promoting an image of working-class solidarity that nullified racial boundaries. He visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and produced a significant amount of radical boundaries. He visited the Soviet Union in 1932 and produced a significant amount of radical writing up to the eve of World War II. He covered the Spanish civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American in 1937.the 1950s and 1960s Hughes published a variety of anthologies for children and adults, including The First Book of Negroes (1952), The First Book of Jazz (1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). In 1953 he was called to testify before the Senator Joseph McCarthys committee on subversive activities in connection with his 1930 radicalism. The FBI listed him as a security risk until 1959; and during these years, when he could not travel outside the United States because he would not have been allowed to re-enter the country. Hughes worked to rehabilitate his reputation as a good American by producing patriotic poetry. From 1960 to the end of his life he was again on the international circuit.the spectrum of artistic possibilities open to writers of the Harlem Renaissance-drawing on African American folk forms; on literary traditions and forms that entered the United States from Europe and Great Britain; or on the new cultural forms of blacks in American cities-Hughes chose to focus his work on modern, urban black life. He modeled his stanza forms on the improvisatory rhythms of jazz music and adapted the vocabulary of everyday black speech to poetry. He also acknowledged finding inspiration for his writing in the work of whit American poets who preceded him. Like Walt Whitman he heard America singing, he asserted his right to sing America back; he also learned from Carl Sandburgs earlier attempts to work jazz into poetry. Hughes did not confuse his pride in African American culture with complacency toward the material deprivations of black life in the United States. He was keenly aware that the modernist vogue in things Negro" among white