preview

The African American Struggle During The United States Essay

Decent Essays

The African American Struggle in the United States Before the civil rights movement in America, many writers that grew up during times of oppression and racial discrimination began to speak out about the problems African Americans faced. Wilson, Hughes, and Hansberry explore the themes of racism and the American dream in their works to reveal the situation for black Americans in the United States during the time period after World War II. The American dream is the idea that every person should have the chance to be successful in the United States. People from all over flocked to the US in hopes of achieving this American dream that everyone talked about; however, things were not quite as expected when they got here. The whole idea was gilded, so to speak. From the outside, everything looked perfect, but once these people settled down in America, they soon realized that it was not everything it had been made out to be. Another huge movement of people in America was the Great Migration. In both Fences and A Raisin in the Sun, the older generations “participates in the Great Migration to escape peonage, Jim Crow, and the South’s racist terrorism in the hope of securing a better life in the North” (Hannah 158). It was a period that lasted for several decades when black Americans living in the south migrated to the North and West in hopes of escaping slavery and poverty in the south. They traveled to major cities such as New York and Chicago trying to land jobs in factories.

Get Access