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The Black Panther's 10 Point Program in Jazz Poetry by Connor Guarnieri

       Black advocacy was present in many places in the BAM, and jazz poetry is no exception. Marked by its unconventional prose, its rhythmic tendencies, this form of art is very important in black culture. This form of poetry also sees its fair share of Black Power and Black Liberation ideals entrenched inside. In this post, I hope to show how the Black Panthers 10 point program is present in these poems, showing how popular this belief was at the time.  One example of the ten point program being present in BAM poetry comes in the jazz poem a/coltrane/poem by Sonia Sanchez. In the poem, she quite bluntly talks about her anger about rich white men, such as the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, who seemingly ruin day to day life: “YEH. U RIGHT THERE. YOU ROCKEFELLERS. MELLONS VANDERBILTS FORDS. Yeh. GITem. PUSHem/PUNCHem/STOMPem. THEN LIGHT A FIRE TO THEY pilgrim asses.” Sonia Sanchez is expressing a hatred towards these oppressive figures in the way of jazz po...
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The Civil Rights Movement and Down By the Riverside by Connor G

  One big piece of the story Down by the Riverside by Richard Wright was the idea of the protest novel. His story highlights the struggles that black people had to endure in the post-slavery south, in the midst of Jim Crow laws. As mentioned above, this writing is a protest novel, and clearly so with all the tragedy and misfortune that befalls the main character, Mann, as a result of said Jim Crow laws. While the whole story could be considered as a novel written to oppose the prevalent racial segregation in the south, many passages offer a summary of the attitudes of Black Americans at the time.  One passage that speaks to the movement for equal rights in Down by the Riverside is when Mann is forced to work the levee during the flood, even after his wife was pronounced dead. “Well, you don't have to go to the hills. Your folks'll go on to the hills and you can stay here and help on the levee…” Capm, please! Ahm tired!” “This is martial law,” said the colonel, turning to ...
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Harriet Jacobs and Booker T. Washingtons Conflicting Views on Slavery - Connor Guarnieri

The biggest difference between Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington is the author's portrayal of slavery. Harriet Jacobs writes about her sexual abuse as a slave under Dr. Flint, how similar things happened to other slave girls, and paints a picture of slavery being a system built on abuse of African-Americans that should be stopped. Washington on the other hand, doesn’t exactly applaud slavery, but has a more liberal approach, he said that it built resilience in African Americans, and almost downplays the effects of slavery.                Harriet herself admits that she didn’t feel that she was enslaved in the beginning as a child. She frequently played with other white children, and lived a “carefree” childhood according to her, before everything went wrong. After her previous, more generous master passed away, she was sold to Dr. Flint, an evil and selfish man who had a certa...
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