Five Generations

Name:

Course:

Lecturer:

Date:

Five Generations

            The author of the book is trying to show the different ways of how the black people were being treated in the early twentieth century to the mid-twentieth century. In between those five decades, the colored people were being discriminated in all sorts of manner. Additionally, she has used to show the different types of the black community. Therefore, the author of this book is trying to talk about the different situations the black people, especially the women, had to undergo in order to survive in the community where they were being discriminated.

The book is talking about a Negro teacher who is a woman, to show the different types of black people and the levels of discriminations they had to go through. For instance, there was a time she was alighting a bus and she was thrown out, she fell down on the ground lying helplessly. She was seriously injured nobody was there to help her. When she consulted her lawyers, she was told that when the jury sees that she is colored, she was not going to win her case despite the fact that the driver and the conductors actions of the throwing her out. Due to these treatments, her hopes and faith had started to run down and become finished. However, she had a friend who had raised her hopes through Christianity. She thought that she was God sent.

Additionally, the author has shown how some of the colored people had lost hope in life to the point where they no longer cared about what was happening. They became drunkards, dirty people and they had nowhere to stay. The author saw this when she was cruising around with the missionary and saw colored people in the streets and felt disgusted with how they looked. She did not want to believe that her people had set these low standards for themselves. She became humiliated by what she had seen with her fellow black people. This disgust and humiliation was due to the way she was brought up since she was young girl.

The author has also tried to show the different types of colored folks. There were those blacks who were superstitious as believed by the white community. These were blacks in general. The second type of blacks that the author has talked about is the cultured blacks. These blacks had followed their cultures to the letter. They never tried to mimic the cultures of the white folks. Lastly, the industrious blacks, who tried to mimic the cultures of the white folks, they had become like the white people. The author has shown how these different types of black people were being treated during that period of the twentieth century. The author has tried to show this with the use of a black teacher, Miss Noble, who was a Negro woman. Miss Noble was a very industrious woman who had been brought up by the white folk. This led her to mimicking the white people instead of following the black cultures despite of her being a black woman.

Another trial that black women had to undergo was marriage. She says that if women had to get married and stay at home, they could feel no troubles they were going through but because they were trying to struggle in the society, the black women had to help their husband in providing for the family. Additionally, the author has used the Negro teacher who was also an author, to show that the white folk discrimination towards the black people had to end immediately. The teacher wrote a book explaining how the black people felt and how wonderful they were only if the white folks would stop discriminating them. She has continued to show that the black people in the book have became very patriotic with one another during the time of colonialism to gain their independence from the white man. This shows the amount hope and will the black people had among them and what great it could do despite the trials and assumptions the white people had made about the black people.

The author has used different sources in his research to show how the different types of Negros and the type of discrimination they were going through. The first source the author has used is “The diary of Lillian B. Horace” by Karen Kossi-Chernyshev, to show the flow of events in the book. She has used it by showing the different stages of discrimination at different periods using this source in her research. The source shows a research of the African America history in the Southern America. The author also uses the sources to show what was happening to the black community during the period of the early twentieth century to the mid twentieth century.

Additionally, the source has also given the author, the biography of the main character that is being used in the research, that is, Miss Noble. Miss Noble is a Negro woman who is brought up by her mother who later dies at the time she was finishing her college. She has been raised with a lot of poverty in her life until one point where her mother had to go back to work for the white man, where she used to work before. It is due to this, that Miss Noble learnt the ways of the whites and it was at this time that she got a sponsorship for her education. This education is the one that made her to become a teacher. All this has been made available by this source.

The source also talks of the trials of the black women that they were undergoing at the time due to their race therefore, leading to a lot of discrimination by the white people. The source also shows what the women went through before they were married and after they were married in these different trials. This source has been very useful to other with this kind of rich information, which has also contributed in developing the story line/thesis of the author. The author has been able to use the event that happened at the time in relation to the history of the African Americans in the Southern American, Texas in the early twentieth century.

Other sources the author has used are the sources from the Texas State Historical Association. These are different articles, which the author has used to support her story in the book. These articles are very reliable because the author has used them to prove that the events, which she is writing are true, and they have given her additional information, which she has added to her book. These articles are also very credible because they have been published by a very credible source, the university press. Sources published by the university are very credible because they have undergone several checks from various professional scholars.

In addition, these articles have been used to support the information, which shows that the black community was being discriminated due their race and their economic status. The sources have helped the author with the different events a Negro teacher went through and how she gave back to the society to help her people despite all the set backs she had to go through. Examples of these are poor housing problems that made it difficult for her especially during the rainy seasons. What she had to go through in the streets, like the situation where she was thrown out of a bus, she was seriously injured, and yet there was nothing she could do.

In the book, the author has been very successful in showing how the black people were being discriminated. She has used a black woman who is a teacher, to show the different types of blacks that there are as seen by the white people. Additionally, the author has used the book in form of a story, which has shown the current events of the African American history in the early twentieth century. Since one of the main objectives of the author was to show how discrimination was done towards the black people by the white people she has successfully succeeded in this because there are so many instances that she has shown of the black people were suffering in the hands of the white people. For example, the white people were not very hospitable to the black people and usually, they mistreated them and they could not help them in times of need. Additionally they saw them as very poor people who were illiterate and could not be able to help themselves. Therefore, the author has succeeded in showing her objectives in the book.