LELE Ségrégation

INTRO :

Segregation takes place in the Southern States of the USA, after the Civil War, so after the abolition of slavery. Former slavery states in the South implemented new laws to « replace » slavery and re-etablish inequality called segregation. Schools and publics places for exempleswere seperated for black and white people. We’ll see some exemples which deals with this term.

I- Strange Fruit, sung by Billie Holiday

II- Warriors don’t cry, by Melba Patillo Beals

III- If we must die, by Claude McKay

1) What is the document ?

2) What does the author want to show ? How does he/she fight back ?

3) Why I chose this document ?

I- Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday

1) It’s a poem composed by Apel Meeropol and sung by Billie Holiday. There are many words which are referring to the nature and to the human body too. There is one word in the poem which is recurrent, it’s « fruit ». The strange fruit is a metaphor for dead bodies hanging in trees.

2) The author and singer denounce the hanging of black people by especially the Ku Klux Klan.

3) I chose this poem because I find that the opposition of the beauty of nature and dead bodies is a very hard-touching way to express the violence of segregation.

II- Warriors don’t cry, Melba Patillo Beals

1) It’s an extract of Melba Patillo Beals’s diary, written in 1994 (nineteen ninety-four). It deals with a girl, Melba who is bullying by a white boy called Andy. Every time he wants to hit or hurt her, she always said « Thank you » and went away. She didn’t want him to see her cry ; She didn’t want to appear weak, she only wanted to  show the warrior inside her.

2) The author wants to show that there is an another way to fight back indeed violence, you can fight for your rights by passive resistance.

3) I chose this document because i think it’s very courageous to respond the violence by kindness.

III- If We Must Die, by Claude McKay

1) This poem has been written in 1919 (nineteen nineteen), and published in 1922 (nineteen twenty-two) by Claude McKay. People saw it as the first African American resistance made in literature. Themes which are exposed in this poeme are death, honor and war. This poem touched the hearts of many, even non-African Americans.

2) The message of this poem is to keep fighting back, even though the chances of winning seem small.

3) I chose this poem because the speaker is pretty sure that death is inevitable so he wants it to be an honorable death.

CC : All of these documents show differents way to express a point of view. It can be a song, an extract of a diary so a testimony or a poem. But all of them show a same thing : the violence behinds the segregation, and an inevitable death.

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