The short poem suggests to a black woman that she should be proud of her background. ... By leaving the racist notions out of the poem, Bennett suggests that the implication of dark skin being unattractive is merely a source of slavery itself. ... Through her effective and assertive poem, Bennett is able to show pride in being a black woman. ... The royal origins and the blackness of her skin are the source of empowerment in this poem. ... In comparison to his poem, "America, " he views the country as a sexual being and through this, he feels empowered. ...

• Word Count: 2535
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography

Jean Toomer's Cane was published in 1923, a miscellany composed of fifteen poems, seven stories, six prose vignettes and a play that all focus on Negro life during the 1920's. ... Toomer continually struggled with his own identity 'I wrote a poem called "The First American", the idea of which was that here in America we are in the process of forming a new race, that I was one of the first conscious members of this race'.7 Cane however, was still marketed by Waldo Frank as 'a book about Negroes by a Negro'8 and this slogan appeared in the New York Times and New ...

• Word Count: 3347
• Approx Pages: 13

And this is the way I look at the poems and short stories like Langston Hughes or Zara Neal Hurston wrote. ... But there is no clear evidence that the Harlem Renaissance started exactly at this time because there are scholars who see a poem by W.E.B. ... And I think the creativity of writing a poem, story or musical comes exactly from this state of mind. ... The steady loss of orientation of the social and political position of African Americans in America and the growing exodus of blacks from their homes in the south to the northern cities are issues that the Harlem writers tried to work thro...

• Word Count: 4309
• Approx Pages: 17
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

This was Angelou's encouragement that African-Americans could stand tall in the face of slavery and racism, paralleling how slaves were able to persevere by encouraging each other through songs and poems. ... (1-21, w&w) CHAPTER 2 The first line in the poem ("you may write me down in history / with your bitter, twisted lies") refers to the way that attitudes towards African-Americans have been embedded within our nation's history. ... This is an example of selective processing, which Angelou referred to with the first two lines of the poem. ... In STIL I RISE, the second sta...

• Word Count: 4173
• Approx Pages: 17
• Grade Level: High School

What was the Harlem Renaissance? What is a renaissance? A renaissance is a movement or period of vigorous artistic and intellectual activity. There was a famous renaissance in Europe during the transition from medieval times to modern times that is still taught today. The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. ...

• Word Count: 2619
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Poets like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay created poems that spoke of racial discrimination of black people which put a new perspective on racism to the general population. ... Claude McKay illustrates the struggle of black people in a very racist environment in his poem "Enslaved," "Oh when I think of my long-suffering race, for weary centuries despised, oppressed, enslaved and lynched, denied a human place in the great life line of the Christian West; and in the Black Land disinherited, robbed in the ancient country of its birth, my heart grows sick with hate, becomes as lea...

• Word Count: 2640
• Approx Pages: 11
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

This composition will look at protest songs, poems, and chants as a form of peaceful protest used by both black and white South Africans to fight against Apartheid and the effect it had on the collective citizenry of South Africa, European nations, and the United States. ... Protest songs, praise poems, and liberation chants suddenly became a means of communicating their disgust with the current oppressive governmental policies. ...

• Word Count: 3760
• Approx Pages: 15

The Works of James Baldwin We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only forces that can change it. James Baldwin was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. Shortly after his birth his mother married David Baldwin, a factory worker and Pentecostal minister. Baldwin was the eldest of nine children. Because of his troubled relationship with his strict stepfather, Baldwin turned to reading as a way to escape. ...

• Word Count: 2618
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

Introduction The Middle Passage is the crossing of the Ocean from Africa to America of African people, who passed from the state of liberty to the state of slavery, and took place between the XVI and XIX centuries. They were captured from the tribes situated on Africa's West Coast: Nigeria, Iv...

• Word Count: 4160
• Approx Pages: 17
• Grade Level: High School