From the main post 4

Oral History

I decided to look at Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices “We millions of black folk who live in this land were born into Western civilization of a weird and paradoxical birth. The lean, tall, blond men of England, Holland, and Denmark, the dark, short, nervous men of France,
Spain, and Portugal, men whose blue and gray and brown eyes glinted with
the light of the future, denied our human personalities, tore us from our
native soils, weighted our legs with chains, stacked us like cord-wood in the
foul holes of clipper ships, dragged us across thousands of miles of ocean,
and hurled us into another land, strange and hostile, where for a second time
we felt the slow, painful process of a new birth amid conditions hash and
raw (12).

Comments
12 Million Black Voices as I mentioned in my original post is one of the best text I studied so far in this class. I love this text because of the poetic languages and imagery employed to narrate the oral history of the black people. The graphics also depicted on the pages of the text gave me a sense of the discrimination, humiliation, and the level of poverty the black people were subjected to at that time period. I also learnt new terminologies and expressions like kitchenette, which I found out to mean where people cook and still sleep, Lords of the Lands etc. One interesting aspect of this history is that, both African-Americans and the poor whites were exempted from schools as at 1940 when schools were being established. So in other words, literacy was basically for people from the rich class