Oppression: African American and Matin Luther King Essay

Submitted By arafjamil
Words: 1156
Pages: 5

The power people thrive for, the need to be in control. There are many ways a person can impose another but one kind every human should know is through cruel and unjust treatment. During the 1900s Blacks, African Americans, Negros what they were called were ruled over whites. African Americans were mistrusted, criticized, and trotted, went through life everyday like it was their last. African Americans lived in America “the land of the free, and justice for all” but it wasn’t that to them they living through a time where there was no justice there was no freedom they were segregated with no rights. James Baldwin believed that the educational system was educating students to be schizophrenic. Which lead them to not be able to change their way of living which left them at the age of oppression. And Martin Luther king who said that the government wasn’t letting them speak up for themselves and left them at a time of oppression. The civil rights era was such a horrible era. Slavery had been abolished but for Blacks, America was still a place dominated by race hatred and oppression. In most southern states, restaurants, bars, toilets, parks and public facilities were strictly segregated. Kids went to school were they were thought lies. An era where 20 million Negros are in poverty, and beaten sometimes even killed in daily bases. A true nightmare. James Baldwin, a Negro man who wrote the “A Talk To Teachers.” He vividly describes that children who are attending school are being misled, their being thought lies about their humanity, and racism has forced them to believe these lies. These lies have caused these children to choose the wrong path, it changes their perspective of life and causes them to do irrational things such as becoming criminals as there only hope. The issue Baldwin is saying that the black children are not catered to the same as everyone else so as they grow up most up them cannot survive without crime. When a child tends to not understand many things. When they notice certain events they would begin to draw their own conclusions. Children will try to figure out what is happening around them. Soon they begin school and will listen to the teacher and make sure they learn what she says; every person is thought to believe that everything a teacher says is true. They then begin to swallow everything they’re told the bad and the good, Baldwin says that kids were thought that “black men were brought here as a source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals.” You would believe that because it your teachers, the children who are being thought this don’t know anything about himself. This is what to a Black child is thought before he discovers he notices the shape of his oppression. Even Young black children all suffered against unjust oppression under the high-class whites. They brain washed these kids with lies, they shaped their perspectives into what they want them to believe, that they were just a source of cheap labor. The reason Baldwin says why America has went to such measures to keep then Negros in place is “once he suspects his own worth, once he starts believing that he is a man, has begun to attack the entire power structure.” Whites can forbid blacks from noticing his own worth. The oppressive rules of the government has caused a lot of innocent people to suffer and Martin Luther king also has something to say about it when he was imprisoned in Birmingham jail and wrote his letter “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. Progression was made, slavery was tarnished, but Jim Crow laws came into effect with was so oppressive of the whites to pass. King opposed it, and began a non-violet campaign. Which it didn’t any effect on the predicament they were in. king was then going to begin a direct action protest but kept getting stalled by the government. While the stallment, blacks were still being