Ap English 3
11/20/11
Synthesis paper: “The Ways of Meeting Oppression”, “Black Men and Public Spaces”, “The Declaration of Sentiments”, “Speech to the Virginia Convention”. The four preceding articles all discuss the obligations of individuals within a society. They go in depth with slavery, Martin Luther King Jr., and their opinions on how everything was going in their time as in slavery. Martin Luther King’s “The Ways of Meeting Oppression” explains how oppressed people deal with their oppression in three characteristics. Those three characteristics that he stated were, “Acquiescence”, “Physical Violence”, and Nonviolence Resistance”. In this article Martin Luther King Jr. had a very profound thesis that really tied the article together. This thesis states, “There is such thing as the freedom of exhaustion.”
The next article, “Black Men and Public Space.”, is about a man, Brent Staples, coming home and following behind a white woman. He describes how scared the woman gets when she notices the man behind her and goes into great detail how race, gender, and class play a big role in society and government. Mr. Staples also gives a strong ethical statement. “As a softly who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken-let alone hold one to a person’s throat-I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once.” The quote before states, “… it was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into-the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless wayfarers.” This quote and Brent Staples as well are trying to say that not all Negroes are rapist, let alone muggers, and that they can actually be treated as actual humans. Brent Staples also has a very strong thesis. This thesis states, “My first victim was a woman-white, well