writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

the conditions of Blacks after the Second World War. Manning Marable and Leith Mulling's
evaluation of the struggles of African Americans during this period matches Angelou's depiction:
"This environment of white supremacy and unqualified racial repression led to new developments in
the political character and protest organizations of African American people." 14 Angelou's motive of
representing the racial discrimination of her childhood era is for her readers to compare it with their
present situation and the progress made by the African American protest movement of the 1950s‐
60s.
Beside the depiction of collective experiences of African Americans, Angelou's autobiography has
another political intention, which is only realized through a close analysis of the achronological
structure of the selected life events. Since the arrangements of the events are not following a
timeline, it becomes apparent they are organized based on a common motif of racial resistance and
protest which matches the controversial debate over violent vs. non‐violent protest at the end Civil
Rights movement era. Therefore, the overall narrative can be divided into three stages of resistance
against racism, which depicts the gradual progress of this type of protest: passive/non‐violent
resistance, transitional resistance, active/violent resistance. Through this categorized perspective,
not only Angelou has shared her own developing attitude in confronting racism, but also
simultaneously, she has given an overview of the evolution of Black community's resistance to
racism.
As mentioned before, from the onset of her autobiography Angelou selects events that focus on
the racist surroundings she lived in as a child such as describing the unfair and harsh working
conditions of Black cotton pickers to the constant daily racism in a small segregated town. It is in this
prejudiced environment that Angelou is introduced to the initial stage of protest through her
interaction with the older generation, such as Grandmother Henderson and Uncle Willie. Angelou
presents the views of this generation on their relationship with the whites through her
grandmother's ideology, which she believed her grandchildren/younger generations should follow:
She didn't cotton to the idea that whitefolks could be talked to at all without risking
one's life. And certainly they couldn't be spoken to insolently. In fact, even in their
absence they could not be spoken of too harshly unless we used the sobriquet 'They'. If
she had been asked and had chosen to answer the question of whether she was cowardly
or not, she would have said that she was a realist. 15
Therefore, the older generation's subtle protest tactics result from this firmly rooted belief in
"realism". Although their approaches against racist encounters are not very aggressive and might be
considered submissive, their style is the foundation for future models of protest, which Angelou will
engage more with in future events. The hiding of Uncle Willie in the potato/onion bin because of a Ku
Klux Klan lynching threat and the humiliation of Grandmother Henderson by the powhitetrash
children are good examples that illustrate this point. Although powerless to protest through physical
actions, a sign of dissent is embedded in the older generation's non‐violent approach. Their voice
becomes the only tool for expressing their resistance and opposition, as Uncle Willie continuously
moans throughout the night and Grandmother Henderson constantly moans a hymn while enduring
the impudent behavior of the "powhitetrash" girls. In both contexts, the significance of the voice, in
representing the uprising of the suppressed voices of the minorities, cannot be ignored.
In the first stages of protest, Angelou acts as a witness and an observant to the pivotal racist
encounters but in the next stage; she becomes the central target for a racist attack. Mrs. Cullinan's
attempt to call her by a different name connects Angelou's experience to her slave ancestors:
Every person I knew had a hellish horror of being 'called out of his name.' It was a
dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting
because of the centuries of their having been called niggers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows,
boots and spooks. 16
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