Personal Experience with The African American Civil Rights...

I am a woman of color. I registered to vote the day after my eighteenth birthday, anticipating my first ballot the way a kid anticipates Christmas morning. My parents want me to have the best education I can get, which means I plan on attending graduate school after my four years at UC Berkeley. I live in the dorms; my floor is home to both male and female students, some from foreign countries like Turkey and Hong Kong, others less than an hour’s BART ride away from home. We live in a beautiful country where people are not turned away because of race or gender, and while we still have some issues to work out, there are many freedoms that I take for granted having lived here all my life. It is easy for me to forget the struggles of so many people before us, people without whom this nation would not be as free as it is. Nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in the south were still faced with innumerable injustices, including disenfranchisement, segregation, and violence. Jim Crow laws infringed on African Americans’ fundamental rights to a basic education, to suffrage, to serve on a jury, to enter certain shops, and even to use a public restroom. Throughout this time period, activists, African American and white alike, rallied for change using all methods possible: nonviolent protest, civil disobedience, and even violence in some cases. While it is most common to recall the achievements of men such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and A. PhilipShow MoreRelatedEssay about Baldwins Notes to a Native Son1712 Words   |  7 Pagesand based mostly around the World War II era. This essay was written about a decade after his father’s death, and it reflected back on his relationship with his father. 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Though both essays have a common theme the struggle that is encountered by Johnson is a lot more trying as he lived in an era where segregation was instituti onalized and African Americans whereRead MoreThe Young Man Of A Slave, Jarvius Cotton1230 Words   |  5 Pagesgenerations, new tactics have been used for achieving the same goals in order to improve the standards we mark to meet in the world, specifically in today’s state of society. African American’s have undergone a multitude of complex social and economic challenges over decades dating back to enslavement in the pre civil rights era and simultaneously in a present day unequal democracy. 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