Manchild In The Promise Land Summary

Jacob Riis in “How the Other Half Lives” is about the squalor that characterizes New York City’s working class immigrant neighborhoods. He describes deplorable conditions of these immigrants by providing specific examples, relaying them through quotation and images alike. Riis comments on the injustices that the residents of the tenements faced on a regular basis. So, with his attention to detail, Riis provided the contemporary reader with unsettling images of the poor and marginalized along with a few examples of the benefits of reform and reorganization in the poorer communities, to the benefit of residents. Another observer, Richard T. Ely, in “Pullman: A Social Study” writes about the community of Pullman, Illinois located in the suburbs of Chicago.

Instead, most black adults that live in Philadelphia moved there from other places, the majority of them from the South. However, 83% of kids who lived in Philadelphia were born there. The purpose of this document is to show that blacks are moving into major cities, like Philly, to start their families in an effort to build a better life for themselves, disproving the misconception that blacks have lived in Philadelphia for a long time and were not moving throughout the US. White farmers who moved West also had a significant impact on the US due to numerous economic issues and policies.

Although both Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” and James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” tell the tale of a black or not so black man facing the turmoil of segregation. There is a very distinct difference in both tales. Most notably, both men have very different living conditions and take contrasting approaches towards life. James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” takes a very different approach on the entirety of the white or black, segregation issue that so many books have done well. Instead of telling the tale of a struggling black male, fighting to keep a job, moving from home to home as in Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”, but instead tells the side of a “white man”.

Moody’s Final Despair In the autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, by Anne Moody (1968) she ends the story with Essie saying “I WONDER. I really WONDER” (289). In doing this, it is left up to the reader to decide whether or not Essie is hopeful or doubtful about what is to come in the future. After reading the book and finding several instances where Essie witnesses the bad in both white and black people and expresses her hate for both races, it is concluded that the prevailing sentiment is despair towards what the future has to hold for African Americans in the state of Mississippi.

Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community, written by James Oliver Horton, is an interesting book that portrays antebellum African American communities and its occupants whose lives were both confounded by prohibitive powers and brought together by common goals. It explores dynamic debates within these communities over gender, color, and national identities, as well as leadership styles and politics. Published in 1993, this book uncovers the diversity and distinctions of free black society in northern cities such as Boston, Buffalo, and Washington D.C. A Smithsonian director and an American civilization professor at George Washington University in Washington D.C., Horton captivates the reader with a compelling study of the

Tally’s Corner is the sociological interpretation of the culture of Negro streetcorner men. Elliot Liebow sets out to expose the hypocrisies that lead black men in this circumstance. The study is carried out in Washington D.C. The key argument posed by Liebow is that black males are incapable of attaining jobs because they lack education. He also argues that this is a cycle that inevitably results in a trans-generational marginalization of the black race.

Throughout Stephen Steinberg’s book the Ethnic Myth, multiple examples of how different ethnicities achieved economic ability and how others did not is discussed. He analysis a variety of different immigrant groups and how more than their cultural values played into whether or not they were successful in America. The following information in this paper will provide an example using black Americans as part of the “culture-of-poverty”. “The wronged are always wrong…” (New Republic, June 24, 1916) is the opening statement to chapter four and is associated with why the Negro is blamed for their own misfortune.

Inspired by a line in a Richard Wright poem about his own personal migration North, Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winning nonfiction novel, The Warmth of Other Suns, focuses on three individual experiences as well as other accounts from 1915 to 1970 - the period known as the “Great Migration.” Taking place over the course of three different decades, Ida Mae Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Pershing Foster never encountered each other during their journeys. Each came from different parts of the Jim Crow South and individually journeyed to three different areas of the Northern United States. The Great Migration was the expedition of almost six million Southern blacks entering the “promised land” of Northern urban life. Although

White and Black students do not attend the same schools, African Americans do not always have access to the same services as Whites, and a vast majority of the Black population is ultimately restricted to limited housing options in stipulated locations, commonly referred to as the “projects” or the “ghetto”. It is through structural racism that the Black community is redlined and confined, basically ghettoized into a prescribed area of a city. Most studies and accounts of structural racism and geographic containment within Black Belt territories have been dedicated only to the trends of division within America’s metropolitan cities. For example, Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, establishes the relationship between environmental deprivation and cultural oppression through the portrayal of White forces restricting the spatial aspects of African Americans, thus resulting in racially divided communities, schools, and political systems as represented through Chicago’s inner city Black

However, the outcome of Vance’s life was different as he was graduated from Yale Law School, able to get a well-paying job and currently living the American Dream with his wife Usha. The purpose of the author in this memoir was to understand the reader of how social mobility feels and more importantly, what happens to the lives of the white working-class Americans, in particular the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. J.D Vance provides an explanation for the loss of the American dream to poor white Americans living in a toxic culture in this Ohio steel town.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a documentary that explores public housing in Saint Louis, Missouri, in particular the history of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex. Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing project billed as the perfect solution in the early 1950s, to solve the problems of slums in Saint Louis and to bring people back into a city that had seen a population decline from previous years. Saint Louis was an ageing city desperate to regain their postwar prominence as a bustling city, but faced many challenges pertaining to the racial makeup of the segregated city and the loss of many jobs to suburban areas. Many whites had begun to participate in what is now referred to as “white flight”, or the migration of middle class whites to

Lance Freeman, an associate professor of urban planning in Columbia, wanted to investigate if there was any displacement going on in two predominantly black neighborhoods that was briskly gentrifying. Much to his dismay, he couldn’t find any correlation between gentrification and displacement. What was surprising to Freeman was his discovery, “poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods”. (Sternbergh, 19) Freeman adds, “The discourse on gentrification, has tended to overlook the possibility that some of the neighborhood changes associated with gentrification might be appreciated by the prior residents.” (Sternbergh, 19)

He speaks about the story of Clyde Ross, a black man who fled horrible conditions in Mississippi to find work in Chicago. Like many Americans Ross dreamed of owning a home. However, the only way for a black person to buy a home in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century was to buy from predatory “contract” sellers who charged unbillable rates with few legal protections for buyers. Clyde said “To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, I took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza.” Like many blacks in Chicago at the time he got two jobs just to keep up with the payments of the house, overall being kept away from his

During the “Gilded Age” period of American history, development of the Trans-Mississippi west was crucial to fulfilling the American dream of manifest destiny and creating an identity which was distinctly American. Since the west is often associated with rugged pioneers and frontiersmen, there is an overarching idea of hardy American individualism. However, although these settlers were brave and helped to make America into what it is today, they heavily relied on federal support. It would not have been possible for white Americans to settle the Trans-Mississippi west without the US government removing Native Americans from their lands and placing them on reservations, offering land grants and incentives for people to move out west, and the

In the book “The Souls of Black Folk”, Du Bois uses essays to vividly explain the upbringing of the Negroes livelihood before and after the Emancipation Proclamation, the slow rise of personal leadership, and lastly the two worlds within and without the veil and how it has become a problem of training men for life. In the forethought, Du Bois introduces the image of the veil and shows the importance of that single statement, which holds a strong meaning throughout the entire book. In this essay, I will identify the author’s true purpose in the meaning and reference of “the veil” as well as “double consciousness”. During the years following emancipation, black people could choose to live “behind the veil,” viewing their newfound freedom as a blessing, or they could live