Oral myths and heroes

A hero is a person who does something exceptional, who is admired for his/her outstanding actions. A myth can be defined as something wich is supposed to be true but wich is not actually verified. Ever since the creation of the US, some people took risks to change the myth of equal citizenship into reality. Indeed, the constitution promised equality, justice, and liberty for people in the US, but in reality there were slavery first and then segregation for black people. I will first talk about the myth of equal citizenship, and then I will talk about the heroes that changed that myth into reality.

In the US, there was a contradiction between on the one hand the principles of the Declaration of Independance, and on the other hand, those of the Constitution.

There were segregation first and then slavery, White people considered black people as inferior. A century and a half ago, the federal governement passed new laws known as the Jim Crow Laws, wich made segregation legal in the south. Black and white people were « separate but equal ». That shows perfectly that the myth of equal citizenship was wrong.

Now we can talk about the heroes, as we definded them, the heroes do courageous things, they fight for something or they just want to help. They reprresent a model for everybody, their comportement can’t be blamed. We can choose MLK as an example, he spent his entire life fighting against racism, and promotingequality between black and white people in the US. As we can see in his debate against MX, their arguments are opposed, MLK advocates non-violent resistance but certainly not non-resistance. He is one of the heroes that changed a little bit the myth of equality between black people, into reality.

To conclude, we can say that beacause of the slavery and the segregation, the promises of the constitution were not true, so it was a myth. But we have to remind that there were heroes, that never stop fighting for equality, tried to changed that myth into reality, and they arrived to change the things and made the black people conditions better.

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