Through luck and hard work, Douglass was able to gain something of an education, but his experience, like his release from bondage before Emancipation, he stated was hardly the norm. Equality and freedom needed to be extended to all Black Americans. Sojourner Truth's speech "Ain't I a Woman?" chronicles the seemingly endless catalogue of hardships she endured as a female slave, without any self-pity. Although a member of the supposedly weaker sex, and the mother of many children, she was still expected to work hard. As a Black woman, she was forced to work doubly hard against societal racism and prejudice against her gender. She worked as hard as a man but was not rewarded for her labor, monetarily, because she was a slave according to the letter of the law. The efforts of her labor were ignored because supposedly a woman 'couldn't work' due to the fragility of her sex: "Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as...
They believed they should be viewed equally by the law, and not be penalized because of their origins, appearance, or birth. Equality was not something given by birth; however, rather it was something that had to be protected by the law, something both Douglass and Truth were painfully aware of, as their lives had been limited, rather than furthered, by the American legal and political system of justice.
On the threshold of the Civil Rights movement, Baldwin would publish Notes of a Native Son. Though 1953's Go Tell It On The Mountain would be perhaps Baldwin's best known work, it is this explicitly referential dialogic follow-up to Wright's Native Son that would invoke some of the most compelling insights which Baldwin would have to offer on the subject of American racism. This is, indeed, a most effectively lucid examination from the perspective of a deeply
Brown v Board of Education is one of the most famous landmark cases in American court history. Set against the backdrop of the early 1950s, just as the civil rights movement was beginning to heat up, Brown v Board of Education changed the face of American schools in a significant way and set the stage for further more sweeping reforms in other areas, such as worker discrimination and fair labor
In two instances-one at the time of Chicago celebration of the Spanish-American Was he alluded to the color-prejudice that is swallowing the creams of the South, and at another while he dined with President Roosevelt- he has the consequential Southern criticism, sufficiently severe to threaten his popularity. In the North the attitude mostly compelled itself into the verbatim that Washington's counsels of submission ignored some elements of true manhood
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