Working class and racial discrimination

Each period of U. S. history presents an opportunity to think roughly the history of workings class and racial discrimination. Having yet to develop thorough, critical, and radical interpretations of the urbane rights struggle, historians have tended to sh atomic number 18 a sympathetic attitude toward the quest for complaisant rights. They also lack the advantage recently gained by diplomatic historians with the end of the cold war, and they cannot, and do not want to, declare the straggle to be over because racial disaccord has not ended and racial justice has not been achieved.Historians will, therefore, stay fresh to write about an ongoing movement for equal rights in which their advocacy and support see to them important to the movements success. Surveys of the literature by Upton Sinclair and Anne sour have already made important contributions in identifying persistent problems. For these writers, direct personal federation preceded writing about the movements. Unlike Sinclairs The Jungle, threatenings Coming of progress in Mississippi is compelling autobiographical narratives in the African American literary tradition.In a voice that is as subtle as it is insistent, as unpretentious as it is uncompromising, dismal maps her coming of age in Mississippi during the repressive 1940s and fifties and the turbulent early years of the 1960s. Yet Moodys narrative is more than a poignant personal testimony it is an immensely valuable cultural document that offers an insightful view of life in Mississippi during the middle decades of the twentieth century and the carefully orchestrated resistance to that way of life that the civil rights movement initiated during the 1960s.The beautiful descriptions of Moodys Coming of hop on in Mississippi are all very good. They served a purpose and served it well. Coming of Age in Mississippi was a great keep back. It is lively and warm. It is written with pain and blood and groans and tears. It says not what ma n should be, but what man is forced to be in our world. It presents not what our country should be, but it describes what our country really is, the residence of pressure and unfairness, a nightmare of suffering, an inferno hell, a jungle of wild brutes.But I cerebrate that The Jungle, which has beautiful theories, is even a greater book. It was the novel, which was responsible for the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act. In 1906, Sinclairs The Jungle catapulted him into al most(prenominal)-immediate fame. The Jungle became a best-seller in numerous languages and operationually made Sinclairs name known all over the world. The New York Evening World announced Not since Byron awoke one morning to find himself far-famed has there been such(prenominal) an example of world-wide fame won in a twenty-four hours by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair (Foner 89).The Jungle produced big human bes excitement. I think that Upton Sinclair was emotionally involved in the creating of Th e Jungle. Though Upton Sinclairs The Jungle concentrates more on working-class struggle than mobility, it does as well good demarcation in getting readers to think about socialism, immigration, capitalism, and future reform. Written in Chicagos immigrant nearness under the name the Back of the Yards, The Jungle beckons readers to look for history of this neighborhood.Descriptions of the neighborhood encourage readers to think about places where the author was writing and to understand historical events. The labor struggle in the book is based on the ineffective stockyard butt against by workers of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in Chicago in 1904. Sinclair, who was there as a journalist for the Socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, stood among a growing number of pro-labor social workers. Unlike Moody, however, Sinclair evidently had much less sympathy for the struggles of African Americans, as his racialist description of the strikebreakers makes clear.In fact, Si nclair described a aggroup of the strikebreakers as a throng of stupid minacious Negroes, and foreigners who could not understand a cry that was said to them (260). Sinclair describes the strikebreakers especially the African Americans as idle, unqualified, and threatening. He had the most tractable pupils, however. See hyar, boss, a big black buck would begin, ef you doan like de way Ah does dis job, you kin get somebody else to do it. Then a multitude would gather and listen, muttering threats. After the first meal nearly all the steel knives had been missing,and now every Negro had one, ground to a fine point, privy in his boot (261). Sinclairs recurring mention of African American men as bucks deserves attention. Studying the stereotypes of African Americans, Donald Bogle observes the character of the black buck or black brute in D. W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation. Bogle depicts the African Americans as subhuman nameless characters setting out on a rampage of black r age. Bucks are always big, baaadd sic niggers, over sexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh (Foner 41). Sinclair presents a similar stereotype.He dramatizes the accusation by union officials in Chicago where African American strikebreakers brought amoral conditions to the plants because they were more lecherous than white workers. The lack of remonstrance to racist passages gives additional proof of white supremacy during this time, which claimed that the Negro belonged to an wanting(p) race and warned their comrades against violating the Caucasian purity of their association. Unlike Sinclair, Moody presents the South done the eyes of Negro in the battle against Mississippis constituted racist institutions and practices that remained largely unchallenged until the 1960s.While Sinclair again minimizes the cruelty against African American workers by simply saying that the scab who made the mistake of going into Packingtown fared gravely (263) Moody emph asizes the harsh realities of life in the Deep South in the mid-twentieth centuryin Arkansas and Mississippi, respectively. As the critic Roger Rosenblatt has asserted, No black American author has ever felt the need to invent a nightmare to make her point (Foner 89). Touched by the powerful effects of these destructive forces, Ann Moody holds herself with dignity and self-respect.She moves forward toward a goal of self-sufficiency, combining a consciousness of self, an awareness of the political realities of black life in the South, and an appreciation of the responsibility that such awareness implies. Moody, however, is not entirely uncritical of the blacks in Mississippi. In fact, like Richard Wrights Black Boy, the autobiography of Anne Moody can be read as an articulate yet restrained critique of certain aspects of southern black folk culture. It is a culture of fear that attempts to stifle inquisitiveness.Many black adults actively monish the children from asking probing quest ions about race relations. A curious black child, they are afraid, might grow up to be a rebellious adult, and rebellion, they knew, could be lethal in Mississippi. When Moody, as a child, wants to know why whiteness is a marker of privilege or when she asks questions about reports of racially motivated violence, she is face with a wall of silence or sometimes even intimidation. Later when she becomes an activist, some of her relatives plead with her to abandon her activism some, in fear of white retaliation, refuse to consociate with her.However, Moodys fiercest criticism is directed at the whites. She is relentless in her assault on the Mississippi way of life. While she freely acknowledges the decency of some man-to-man whites, even contemplates the possibility of interracial unity, she carefully exposes how the politics of color informs every aspect of life in Mississippi. With appropriately sharp sarcasm, the title of her autobiography alludes to Margaret Meads famous text Coming of Age in Samoa.Mead, an American anthropologist, examines in her work the social rituals and cultural codes that govern an individuals passage from puerility to young adulthood in a supposedly primitive Samoan culture. In Coming of Age in Mississippi, with nearly anthropological precision, Moody maps her maiden journey from innocence to experience among the seemingly primitive whites of Mississippi. Coming of Age in Mississippi is divided into four sections. In the first section, titled Childhood, Moody remembers her early years amid the grinding poverty of rural Mississippi.Even though her parents labor in the cotton fields from dawn to dusk almost every day of the week, they are barely able to feed and clothe their children. At age nine Moody starts doing domestic work for white families. After her father abandons the family, she workings several hours a day after school and on weekends to help feed her siblings. The opening section of the autobiography concludes with he r recollection of her first calculated act of resistance to the southern racial codes. She begins to work for Mrs. off, a white woman. On her first day on the job Moody enters Mrs.Burkes dwelling through the front door. The next day, when she knocks on the front door, Mrs. Burke directs her to the back entrance and Moody complies. However, the following morning, Moody knocks on the front door again. Once Mrs. Burke realizes that she cannot dictate Moodys conduct, she lets her do the domestic chores without complaining. Working for her, says Moody, was a challenge, and Mrs. Burke would be the first one of her type that Moody would defy as she grows older (117). Moodys minor revolt against Mrs. Burke foreshadows her later civil rights activism.Her political awakening begins during her teenage years, and Moody chronicles those years in the books second section, titled High School. When she asks her mother for the meaning of NAACP (127)someaffair she had overheard Mrs. Burke mention to a group of white women who regularly meet at her househer mother angrily tells her never to mention that word in front of any white persons and orders her to complete her homework and go to sleep. Shortly thereafter Moody discovers that there is one adult in her life who could offer her the answers she seeks Mrs.Rice, her homeroom teacher. Like Mrs. Bertha Flowers in Maya Angelous I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Mrs. Rice plays a pivotal role in Moodys maturation. She not only answers Moodys questions about Emmett Till and the NAACP, but she volunteers a great distinguish more information about the state of race relations in Mississippi. Moodys early curiosity about the NAACP resurfaces later when she attends Tougaloo College. Titled College, the tertiary section of the autobiography reveals Moodys increasing commitment to political activism.The fourth and final section of the autobiography, titled Movement, documents Moodys full-scale interest group in the struggle for civil rights. In the opening chapter of the final section Moody narrates her participation in a sit-in at a Woolworths lunch counter in Jackson. She and three other civil rights workerstwo of them whitetake their seats at the lunch counter. They are, predictably, denied service, but the four continue to sit and wait. Soon a large number of white students from a local high school pour into Woolworths.When the students realize that a sit-in is in progress, they crowd around Moody and her companions and begin to taunt them. The verbal abuse quickly turns physical. Moody, along with the other three, is beaten, kicked, and dragged about thirty feet toward the door by her hairsbreadth (226). Then all four of them are smeared with ketchup, mustard, sugar, pies and everything on the counter (226). The abuse continues for almost three hours until they are rescued by Dr. Beittel, the president of Tougaloo College who arrives after being informed of the violence.When Moody is escorted out of Woolw orths by Dr. Beittel, she realizes that about ninety white police officers had been standing outside the store they had been watching the whole thing through the windows, but had not come in to stop the mob or do anything (267). This experience helps Moody understand how sick Mississippi whites were and how their disease, an incurable disease, could prompt them even to kill to preserve the segregated Southern way of life (267). In the chapters that follow she comments on the impact of the assassinations of Medgar Evers and President John F.Kennedy on the civil rights movement, the escalating turmoil across the South, and her participation in the attempts to integrate white churches in Jackson on the Sunday after the murder of Martin Luther King jr. The short final chapter ends with her joining a busload of civil rights workers on their way to Washington, D. C. As the bus moves through the Mississippi landscape, her fellow travelers sing the anthem of the civil rights movement We sh all overcome (384). As she listens to the words of the song, Moody wonders. The autobiography ends with two short sentences I WONDER. I really WONDER (384).The word wonder, in the background of the autobiography, lends itself to two different meanings. On the one hand, it suggests that Moody is skeptical if blacks in Mississippi will ever overcome, as the anthem asserts. On the other hand, the word reveals her awe over her participation in a mass movement, her remarkable journey from her impoverished childhood on a plantation to her defiant participation as a young adult in a social rebellion that will shake the foundations of Mississippi, and the dignity and determination she sees on the faces of her fellow travelers on the bus to Washington, D. C. Both novels work well in determining the distinction between revolution and reform.The result, the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, was championed as a advantage of progressive reform, but in many ways it was a defeat for Sinclair and his revolutionary ambition. Coming of Age in Mississippi expanded coverage and broadened agreement of the black freedom movement beyond the traditional major events, individuals, and institutions. Moody examined the relationship between organized labor and the black freedom struggle. Her book heart-to-heart new ways of understanding the southern movement.The economic forces that inspired the works by Upton Sinclair and Anne Moody still operate. And the books do more than prove the importance of interracial labor solidarity. The works remind us that racialized enmity and violence are never without moral, political, and socioeconomic consequences. Works Cited Foner, Eric. The New American History. Philadelphia Temple University Press, 1990. Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. Laurel Editions, 1992. Sinclair, Upton. The jungle. Memphis, Tenn. St. Lukess Press, 1988.