Aldo's Tales from Uni English

     Both Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X were influential figures in the fight for civil rights. Separated by the better part of a century, they still took similar paths through life. They began in dangerous and demoralizing conditions, but fixated in their adolescence on learning to read and educating themselves despite numerous barriers. Both used this skill to develop an understanding of the problems facing Black people in their times, and eventually both became prominent advocates for the whole of their race. But within these general periods of their early lives, their individual experiences varied significantly, taking their beliefs, goals, and tactics in two very different directions. Booker T. Washington felt that racism could be eventually beaten through forgiveness, incremental change, and programs which worked "inside the system," like vocational training, while Malcolm X argued that significant change would never occur without constant, aggressive activism ...

     It is widely known that conditions in the Jim Crow-era South were viciously oppressive and harmful to Black people, as well as anyone else without white skin. Even today, many ideologies of this time, like the idea that giving other people rights "costs you yours," continue to actively hurt the same communities as they did nearly 100 years ago. And throughout history, natural disasters have only further shown the effects of systems of discrimination through the disproportionate harm they cause to marginalized communities. In "Down by the Riverside," Richard Wright places a fictional yet realistic Black farmer, Mann, in the real and deadly Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 , mainly to protest the immense inequality in the South under Jim Crow. But also, at several points, he uses Mann's thoughts to present his idea of a world free of the racism that caused the story's violence and injustice in the first place.     One such passage where these goals are app...