colored people essays

colored people essays Segregated Peace: an essay on Colored People Integration was a main theme or topic in this memoir. It played an important role in the time when Gates was growing up and had a big affect on him throughout his book. Integration changed the way Gates viewed, whites, blacks, restaurants, hairstyles, church, school, etc. He went from a conformist to a rebel to an Episcopal. His community changed with him and the older generation of course did not take to integration as well as most of the younger generation did. Integration was considered a good thing to most people and others believed that Blacks had lost something through the whole ordeal. They believed that they had lost the close knit family ties that segregation indirectly created. Gates sums up the way the community felt about integration in one of his last sentences in his memoir. He writes, All I know is that Nemos corn never tasted saltier, his coffee never smelled fresher, than when these hundreds of Negroes gathered to say goodbye to themselves, their heritage, and their sole link to each other, wiped out of existence by the newly enforced anti-Jim Crow laws.(Gates, 216) It was hard for blacks to integrate into all white schools after being surrounded by blacks for most of their lives. Whites werent the only ones to critique black attitude and black style, blacks did it to themselves. Gates writes that when he was a child he remembered that when blacks were admitted to all white neighborhoods or schools, Negroes were the first to censure other Negroes(Gates, xiii). His father would say things like, Dont go over there with those white people if all youre going to do is Jim Crow yourselves(Gates, xii). Even Gates writes, I always reserved my scorn....for someone too dark, someone too loud, and too wrong.(Gates, xiii). The way Gates writes it, blacks would scrutinize their own kind. ...