Sarah Burn's Argumentative Essay: The Central Park Five

The books begin with explaining the offense as it was in Memphis and this is in 1892. The problem that is being discussed in the chapter is the lynching of the black people, and

During the Great Migration, nearly two million blacks were moving to northern cities to escape the oppression in the south. However, blacks found themselves in unexpected prejudice. Boyle shows that racism was the number one issue for blacks during 1925, even in the north. At this time in the book, if a black man were to kill a white man, the black man would immediately be charged with first degree murder. However, if a white man were to kill a black man, it would be considered self-defense.

The main point was that although African Americas were able to be in society, they were not treated fairly in the legal systems of the United States. Lebsock was trying to portray this by showing that each character was treated in some way unfair, in the justice system. The author spun a tale that reflected pass events that happened in the 1890’s to help bring more clarity to the subject at hand. She brought in real life evidence and accounts to help support her fictional story. The evidence that she used was well research and doubled checked from multiple newspapers, witness accounts, court records, and documents from the time of the murder.

This killing just reiterated the fact that there was a clear difference in the two groups. It showed that they were in fact not going to be treated equally, and that they had no intentions of changing that anytime soon. This murder just paved the way for the whites to treat the African Americans however they wanted to, which would lead to several more racially motivated crimes to occur. Another of example of crime in the book is the burning down of businesses. This started from the unrest that was started when the businesses of the whites were being challenged by the success of the African American

As an English professor in the University of Maryland, Jeanne Fahnestock is one of the modern rhetoricians with several master pieces. She mostly focuses on scientific rhetorical analysis in argument, especially in word choice and figures of speech. Her notable works are Rhetorical Gigures in Science(2002), A Rhetoric or Argument(2003) with Marie Secor, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion(2011). The book A Rhetoric of Argument with Marie Secor discusses about arguments in four aspects: definition arguments, causal arguments, evaluation arguments and proposal arguments. These four aspects, now become standard in many argument texts, give readers a constructive, engaging way to analyze arguments by other writers and to construct their own arguments.

The chapters begin with a backstory of the victim before going into detail about the event that took place, then concluding with how the court case went and the public's reaction. This is effective due to the fact that it automatically draws the reader in by sharing the devastating stories, while also representing the horrors of this time period without delay. Throughout the chapters, various organizations such as the NAACP and WPC are discussed in order to further portray the significance of the events and the impact these men and women had on society. By concluding each chapter with summarizations of the outcomes of the court cases and/or the public's reaction, Societies transformation is slowly represented because as the chapters go on, the jury votes more in favor of the African American victims. This gives the reader insight into how the different assaults and cases gradually changed society, gaining more and more support for the civil rights movements cause, representing how these women and men's stories greatly influenced the outcome of this

The event,which the narrator initially believed was to recite his speech turns out to be racial abuse, of white man empowering over the African Americans . For instance the white blindfold tightly covering each African American, representing the white blinding the foreseeable truth of racial hate: as well inferring to the ignorance of the people at that time who could hate a person for the color of

With “freedom….the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed (75),” this was because with the little freedom that blacks had, the white man did not want to take a chance at anything. A black man’s punishment was far more horrible than a white man being punished for the same exact

I watched a documentary film “The Central Park Five” for this week’s field experience. The movie examines a 1989 case of five black and Latino teenagers who were convicted of raping a White woman in Central Park, NY. Compared to the research above, the five young male were guilty because of outside racism. The movie provides background, interviews, expert analysis, and details of associated facts related to the case. The five young men were forced and threatened to write their crime “story” but no one doubted their confession even though there was no DNA test results.

Soon enough these black young men were taken to trial in court for being accused of rape. The trial was 1-3 days for a total of 9 people, which proves that people think less of black people than whites because white trials were usually longer than a few days (Johnson). During the trials a doctor said there was no evidence of rape on either of the two women, but he never went to court to have a say and help out these young men (Johnson). At the trials, no one seemed to care about the black men’s side of the story even if the judge knew the crime never happened. Anderson stated, “One lawyer was seeing butterflies and one was trying to catch butterflies.”

The blacks did not receive the same luxuries as the whites did. For instance, the colored received less than stellar entertainment where as the whites were able to get anything they wanted, “There, instead of houses and trees, there were fishing wharves, boat docks, nightclubs, and restaurants for whites. There were one or two nightclubs for colored, but they were not very good” (Gaines 25). It was unjust to the blacks that they could not enjoy themselves as much as the whites because of their skin color.

The authors use of words such as “dark clouds of racial prejudice” and “I cannot sit idly by” shows the injustice that was occurring in Birmingham. The “dark clouds” represent the social climate of Birmingham, allowing readers to see the negative effect it his having on the black citizens. He believed the injustice needed to be addressed and action needed to be taken against it, therefore what he did was justified. Additionally when Martin Luther King writes, “nagging signs reading ‘white’ men and colored when your first name becomes ‘nigger’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title of Mrs…” This further demonstrates the unjust treatment of African Americans which is why someone needed to take action and not idly sit by as these things occcurred.

The climax of his career subsisted in the midst of national turmoil. During this time, African Americans were trying to define their Blackness and their humanity in a land where they were treated second class. Author Wallace Terry put in words the thoughts that spun through the minds of the African American community,

Another major topic was Emancipation, for this story takes place during the Emancipation of 1865 to about 1903. He also talks about the ways to improve the hard times they endured and how he believed that things would always be difficult for the black man because of the color line. After the Emancipation of 1865, the African Americans were free from slavery.

There are white thugs just as commonly as there are black. Even as it unfolds with a terrible sense of inevitability, “Fruitvale Station” is rarely predictable. The climatic encounter with BART police officers erupts in a mood of vertiginous uncertainty, defusing facile or inflammatory judgments and bending the audience’s emotional horror and moral outrage toward a both necessary and difficult ethical inquiry. How did this happen? How did we – meaning any one of us who might see faces of our own depicted on that screen – allow