Town Hall Meeting

The other day in class, we had a mock town hall meeting where we picked characters based off of whether they were pro-slavery or anti-slavery. I chose Sojourner Truth. Since I already wrote a post about Sojourner, I'll give a brief summary of what I learned. Sojourner was a slave who was bought and sold four times. She eventually escaped and found an abolitionist family to buy her her freedom. She went on to be one of the most famous women's rights activist and abolitionist. Another person I found interesting to learn about was Frederick Douglas. Douglas was mixed race, with a white dad and a black mom. Douglas could also be considered a women's rights activist, for he is widely known for speaking out on women's suffrage, with a lot of emphasis on the 15th Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote but left out black women. Douglas also wrote several autobiographies on his life as a slave, and even wrote for a paper called the North Star. Douglas is definitely a figure that everyone could look up to. He started as a slave with nothing and no education but went on to be a writer and worked to be highly educated and respected. You can learn more about him here.

We also learned about what are known as the "Reconstruction Amendments". The reconstruction amendments did exactly what the name says: they reconstructed American society. The amendments included are the 13th, 14th, ad 15th amendments. The 13th abolished slavery, the 14th gave citizenship to African Americans, and the 15th gave African American men the right to vote.

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Glory

A few days ago in my seminar class, we watched a movie called "Glory". "Glory" depicts the story of the 54th Infantry Regiment in Massachusetts during the American Civil War. It shows the difficult and at times, uncomfortable story of the transition from slave to soldier. The men may have freed themselves from slavery, but they have yet to be free from the stigma that slavery created around them. This movie was packed with tons of significant moments but I think my favorite was when Robert Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick) decided to take matters into his own hands when acquiring supplies for his soldiers. The men were denied basic attire like socks, shoes, and military uniforms due to the racial discrimination that they were still facing. Shaw wouldn't stand for it anymore and went to talk to the man in charge of attire. I think this is a great representation of what white people need to be doing in America right now. They need to use their privilege to upli...

My Thoughts on Gone With the Wind

I recently watched the movie "Gone With the Wind" in my seminar class: here are my thoughts. I mainly want to focus on one thing: the representation of African Americans in the film. Specifically focusing in on the characters Mammy and Prissy. The two main black characters in the film are Mammy, played by Hattie McDaniel, and Prissy, played by Butterfly McQueen. This movie portrays the complicated dynamics and stereotypical box black women are put in. For one, I loved seeing the relationship between Scarlett and Mammy. We can see throughout the film that Mammy is the one who basically raises Scarlett. She cooks her meals, is always making sure she eats, she helps her get dressed, makes sure she's on time, and so on and so forth. One might think that this makes Mammy look submissive to Scarlett, and literally, she IS. But when we dive deeper into Mammy's attitude and personality, she is exactly the opposite. Through her interactions with Scarlett, we see Mammy being a...

The Jim Crow Era and Brown v. The Board

Today in seminar I learned about two things: Brown v. Board and the Jim Crow Era. It was weird to learn about some of these things, because they seem so inhumane and so outdated. But the truth is that some of these things are still very much present in this country, such as blackface, a rising topic in media and entertainment, and lynchings, something that is still happening today in the midst of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Lynchings started occurring in the late 1870's and continued to occur for almost a hundred years. It was used as a form of punishment for black people who committed any type of social aggression, ranging from an accusation of a crime to something as small as bumping into a white woman, and the accuses weren't even given due process. Because white people didn't feel as if the law was working, they took the law into their own hands. The people that were responsible for these crimes were never charged or arrested. There was a total of abou...

Christina Talks About Freedom

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