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Connections Between the Black Panther Party "10-Point Program" and BAM Poetry

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          I believe the first, third, and fourth points of the 10-Point Program are most directly expressed in Black Arts Movement poetry. Specifically, the poems “For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide,” “I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra,” and “Sin of Msippi,” respectively. The Black Arts Movement poems and the 10-Point Program are connected by themes of independence and autonomy from oppressive white influences and the desire for absolutely equal opportunities and rights. In my interpretation, points one, three, and four closely resemble the ideas mainly expressed in these three poems. Everything could be connected through the common theme of the Black empowerment era, both in the literary realm and in real-world, actionable causes.  I connected the first point, “We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community,” to Etheridge Knight’s “For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide. This idea of black people having the ability to w...
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Understanding the Civil Right's Movement Through Richard Wright's "Down by the Riverside"

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     I believe Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” vehemently supports the change brought by the civil rights movement, but asserts that there is still a lot that needs to be done, specifically in terms of economic and resource equality. The whole short story focuses on depicting the most vivid, gruesome, but very possible life of a Black man living in Jim Crow South during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The story doesn’t hold back on providing the reader with the pure terror and hopelessness filling the everyday life of a Black person in America. The main character, Mann, is forced to make difficult decisions to fulfill his family’s rights to basic human necessities. A really good way Wright brings about this urgency for change in the Jim Crow South is Mann’s naivety about the true extent of the pure evil of racist white people. He shows that any optimism or desire to believe things are any better than they are is just enabling the constant cycle of oppression...
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Understanding Reconstruction Through the Eyes of Charles Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth"

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Charles Chesnutt The notable Reconstruction era, occurring after the American Civil War, is depicted in many ways. Some see it as the bridge between the antebellum, oppressive United States, to a more prosperous, equal time, and others may see it as an overglorified time period that did nothing but lay the groundwork for the decades of Black struggle to come. The commonality between many of the ways Reconstruction was and is understood is the strong feeling of then vs. now. We had slavery then; now we don’t. African-Americans couldn’t be citizens then; now they could. African-American men couldn’t vote then; now they can. This sentiment of separation between the two eras suggests that the issues that arose from slavery can be dropped, that something new can immediately spring from the rubble. This belief is an overreaching one because (for one) Jim Crow still rampaged in the South for decades after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed, and in the North, there were still al...
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