This morning in class we wrote our essay responses to Alice Walker's 1966-67 essay: The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?" The question I wanted to students to reflect on in a 500 word essay is the same one Walker contemplated, now 41 years ago. What good did the Civil Rights Movement serve? Do you agree with Walker's assessment today? Why or why not? Use concrete examples and support from the text.
I had new students joining us this morning, so they spent the time reading and planned to email me later. Please send essays to professorwandasposse@gmail.com. Attach and paste the assignment. I cannot always open attachments.
Homework for the weekend is to read another Walker essay handout and bring in an outline to share 1/28. You don't have to type the outline.
Start with the thesis then continue with the major points and subsequent evidence gleaned from the essay. The essay is another Walker essay: "Choice: A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."
I like this outline form; however if there is a another form you like better, please use the one you are more familiar with
THESIS
This statement is a declarative sentence. See Diana Hacker: "The Basics"
MAJOR POINT 1
EVIDENCE
EVIDENCE
EVIDENCE
MAJOR POINT 2
EVIDENCE
MAJOR POINT 3
EVIDENCE
AND SO ON
CONCLUDING SENTENCE
Summarize the conclusion in a sentence.
Next week
Depending on how this writing assignment goes, we might continue to meet in the Writing Center for Thursday morning reflections on the week's writing topic and to review certain concepts and skills. Do you like that idea? Students need to bring Alice Walker: A Life to class Monday, january 28, along with a grammar style book, and a college dictionary. Of course you need a notebook, pen, folder for papers. Other stationery items like a stapler, paper clips, white out, a pencil, also help.
I had new students joining us this morning, so they spent the time reading and planned to email me later. Please send essays to professorwandasposse@gmail.com. Attach and paste the assignment. I cannot always open attachments.
Homework for the weekend is to read another Walker essay handout and bring in an outline to share 1/28. You don't have to type the outline.
Start with the thesis then continue with the major points and subsequent evidence gleaned from the essay. The essay is another Walker essay: "Choice: A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."
I like this outline form; however if there is a another form you like better, please use the one you are more familiar with
THESIS
This statement is a declarative sentence. See Diana Hacker: "The Basics"
MAJOR POINT 1
EVIDENCE
EVIDENCE
EVIDENCE
MAJOR POINT 2
EVIDENCE
MAJOR POINT 3
EVIDENCE
AND SO ON
CONCLUDING SENTENCE
Summarize the conclusion in a sentence.
Next week
Depending on how this writing assignment goes, we might continue to meet in the Writing Center for Thursday morning reflections on the week's writing topic and to review certain concepts and skills. Do you like that idea? Students need to bring Alice Walker: A Life to class Monday, january 28, along with a grammar style book, and a college dictionary. Of course you need a notebook, pen, folder for papers. Other stationery items like a stapler, paper clips, white out, a pencil, also help.
posted by Professor Wanda's Posse at 8:23 AM
6 Comments:
9-10
I think it would be a good idea to meet in the Writing Center on Thursday morning of every week.
Teneya
I was sitting here in the office, disappointed the weather turned dreary, and decided to do the assignment myself.
Untitled
Alice Walker’s 1966-7 essay, “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” Takes a frank look at the promise of a movement for justice that perhaps didn’t result in always tangible or measurable results. These intangible gains, while invisible to people whose lives are unaffected by what happens to the less fortunate in society, have enduring value nonetheless. What I see 41 years later is a disconnect between an Alice Walker whose first black person seen on TV was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and children today who see themselves in characters, real and imaginary often on primetime TV. There is a disconnect in twenty-first century America where black children are fed false notions that if they can dream it, they can have it, yet most children’s world are so narrowly defined that they can’t even dream themselves into a better reality.
Walker says she came alive to herself when she saw King on TV. Prior to this she didn’t exist because white America didn’t acknowledge her presence. What the Civil Rights Movement did was allow black people an opportunity to define themselves and take back their power. 40 years after the Civil Rights Act, black people are letting others name them—if we look in the mirror at all what gazes back is always pleasing. The face of a black male is the face of a “criminal.” The face of a black girl or woman is the face of an immoral person, lazy and shiftless, certainly one who thinks little of herself and has no goals.
These views are not unlike those 41 years ago and even further back historically. How can one explain the increased violence in the black community? There has always been violence in the black community—technology makes it easier to count bodies and handguns are certainly more prolific or easily assessable, but the minds who pull the trigger today have a lot in common with the newly freed Africans wandering America looking for a place to belong. The rage then might not have been as internalized as the rage that exists now.
Hostility greeted Civil Rights fighters like the legendary elder, Alice Walker refers to in the essay, who was beaten for “singing Movement songs, placed in solitary confinement in prisons for talking about freedom, and placed on bread and water for praying aloud to God for her jailers’ deliverance.” As long as one person is denied her Constitutional rights, the Movement is still on (120). Revolutionary movements never end because memory is short and oppression, like a cancer, is never completely gone or eradicated, especially when the world is so toxic. Wellness a philosophical rather than practical goal.
King just wanted equal access for his people. He didn’t, as Walker claims, say what form “these freedoms” needed to take. If separate, but equal had been a reality, there wouldn’t have been a need for a Civil Rights Movement, but it wasn’t, just as it isn’t now. The schools in the more affluent neighborhoods in America are still better, and where there are black students enrolled there are still challenges because expectations are different in this racially charged society. Higher tax revenue from property owners aside, the differences between class and race still apply.
But it’s not money, Walker points out, the damage is in the perception. If one sees another as socially and genetically inferior and even science—unchallenged, supports this view, then nothing changes. When those who write the history and control the message see nothing wrong with the picture nothing changes. As Walker says, “The Movement is dead to the white man because it no longer interests him. And it no longer interests him because he can afford to be disinterested: he does not have to live by [such policies], with [these policies], or for [these policies], as Negroes must. He can take a rest from the news of beatings, killings, and arrests that reach him from North and South— Negroes cannot now or will able to take a rest from the injustices that plague them, for they—not the white man—are the target” (121).
Knowledge is certainly power. And the Civil Rights Movement, Walker says, and I agree, showed black people for better or worse how much they’d suffered as slaves and continued to suffer free. The hostility that met, Freedom Summer, when white and black youth, college students, went to the south to register black people to vote it was as if time had stood still—slavery still existed. It was called Jim Crow. Walker says her involvement in civil protest quenched her thirst, a thirst she’d been unaware of.
“I waited to be called to life. And, by a miracle I was called” (122). She says.
I am reminded of a Sweet Honey in the Rock tune, called “No Mirrors in My Grandmother’s House.” When I first heard the song, it was prefaced at the concert with a short story. The singer said there was a little girl who lived in a house without mirrors. Her grandmother told her that all she needed to see was reflected in her Nana’s loving eyes. The little girl was satisfied with this even though others didn’t recognize her beauty and often called her names. The little girl trusted her grandmother and for her grandmother’s opinion was enough. The only self she knew was the little girl her grandmother said was beautiful, that is, until grandmother died.
Alice Walker speaks of a life, prior to the Movement where “the color of her body denied” her access to certain dreams and aspirations. “In the white world I walked, less real to them than a shadow; and being young and well hidden among the slums, among people who also did not exist—either in books or in films or in the government of their own lives—” (122). So many black youth, once again are waiting to be called to life. Who will call them?
Just as Walker, children today are “hungry for a life that turns [them] on; [they also] yearn for a knowledge of living that will save [them] from [their] innocuous lives that resemble death. [They too] look for signs in every strange event; [they] search for heroes in every unknown face” (122). Again, who will call them?
Professor Wanda Sabir
Kenton Low, 1A
The Civil Right Movement
Was It Good?
January 29, 2008
The Civil Rights Movement was a good thing because it helped the Africans Americans by giving them rights and letting them not be disdrimated against just because their skin is different than are skin...The movement was a good thing however there is some conflicts that on lady said that she was mistreated and has been beaten baddy and was for just singing the a Civil Rights Movement song. The African American lady did not deserve to be put in a prison and put in solitary confinement. The Civil Rights Movement show that African Americans have rights and not to be treated unfairly because of the skin color. The Civil Rights Movement served a meaning and awareness that as citizens we have rights.
In The Civil Rights Movement I do be leave and agree with Alice Walker because in the story an African American woman had to do something before she got what so wanted. A woman in the story had got beaten and was put in a prison and in solitary confinement just for singing a song that she was singing to herself.
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