Summary
Summary CORE105 Reading Notes
- Course
- CORE105
- Institution
- American University
A pile of reading notes for the subject of what's the south class.
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“Soul of the South: The Black Belt,” by Imani PerryImani Perry is professor in the studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and
African American Studies. Perry writes the book because she thought about her
identity as a Southerner, Alabaman. She wants people to understand the South is
not some strange place.
The Black Belt is a stretch of land which stretches from Virginia to Louisiana and
Arkansas. Slavery was heavily concentrated in the land because the land was good
for growing cotton. The countries of the South with majority Black populations.
The blackest soil and the Whitest People. The Blackest people and the Whitest
Cotton.
The blackest soil symbolized how nutritious the soil was for growing cotton. And
the Whitest People were the people settling in to take that soil for their own gain.
The Blackest people symbolized most of the population in that area which was
predominately Black. The Whitest cotton is the idea that they were not free
because they had to manually pick the cotton to make profits for plantain owners.
In the 1930s the Black Communists of the South developed the “Black Belt
Theory,” which says that Black people of the Deep South constituted (made up) an
internal colony of the USA. Some argued that the South should embrace self-rule
struggle like the rest of the colonized world.
Who is Richard Wright? Why is he so important?
Born in Mississippi, Richard Wright is an author and is well known for his writings
which depict harsh realities of life for Black Americans in the Jim Crow Era in the
South. Wright spent time in an orphanage before moving with his mother, where he
was raised by strict Seventh Day Adventist grandparents. Black Boy, a memoir,
details Wright’s upbringing during the Jim Crow era. He is important because of
the literary and political networks he secured during this time period. Wright was
one of the first African Americans to make his publications a cultural impact
,because he directly critiques racial violence, segregation and different kinds of
psychological and political limitations placed on African Americans’ ability to
access basic needs like work, education, and their lives.
Eli Whitney solved his problem with cotton gin when the Black people, the slaves,
helped identify the problem with the machine and refined the process of
technologizing agricultural society (production of crops). But this led to many
groups forced to leave their territories. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee, and
Seminole were forced out of their territories in the Southeast because of cotton
greed. White people settled, and Black people were brought to build the wealth.
Many Black people came to this region because of the spread of Black culture
ranging from the blues, spirituals, gospel, from rock to jazz to R&B and hip hop.
The protracted (prolonged) struggle for civil rights was pointed at the enslavement
of Black people bound by cotton. Even when slavery was abolished, Jim Crow is
over, the remaining memories never fade away. The hardships and the struggles of
poverty during that era are still here. We need constant reminders on how the past
made the present. The past will teach us lessons for the present.
The Parchman blues weren’t like plantation songs which were sung to keep
working. Parchman blues were songs that could keep you swinging or shucking or
pulling. The blues were everywhere and sung everywhere but with private
memories and longings, their joys, hurts, and wants. The blues is where we have to
go for freedom.
Bobby Blue Bland: His voice makes you get why he’s called Blue. “His voice is
like daybreak. It cracks, but with sweetness” (Perry 14). The blues is a joke
between songs. Having a good which settles in your chest. Blues can be sad like a
murder ballad.
Reflection: I think blues is catchy and happy but it’s also sad, the creation of blue
plantation songs comes from the hardship that slaves go through and how they
need to keep on going.
Towards the end of Wright’s life, he turned away from his sociopolitical narratives
and wrote haikus.
Many were about his home state. # 725 reads:
, From a cotton field
To Magnolia trees Abundance was found in lush trees and birds flying overhead.
This was found in their imaginations. It wasn’t prosperity.
A bridge of swallows (In the South “swallow” doesn’t just refer to birds but also
gulps of a drink) Often pronounced “squalla,” as in, “Give me a squala of water.”
The people here were swallowed up by the need for cotton. They were taken into
fields, barely making anything or none.
(last PG: 18)
“The People Could Fly,” told by Virginia Hamilton
Virginia Hamilton was a writer of children’s literature, weaving black folktales and
narrative of African American life and experience into her work.
Legend has it that some people in Africa could fly, but when they shipped to
America as slaves, they shed their black shiny wings. When a mother and her baby
are being whipped in the cotton fields, an old slave resurrects his magic and helps
her, and others fly away like birds. Leaving non magical slaves to tell the tale. The
paintings are hopeful and somber, and the slaves are graceful and softly luminous
as slave owners are stiff, pinched, and cruel.
These tales were created from loneliness. But were formed and passed on full of
hope and love. The tales were a way for the oppressed to express their fears and
dreams to one another.
Reflection:
The young man who forgot the words of ancient Africa immediately after hearing
them made me very confused. He forgot the words, so he couldn’t flee completely?
He flew for a while. I think the way he forgot the words was because his identity
was lost, he could remember where he came from because of the brutal suffering
he endured in the plantation field.
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