UCI Progress of Black People Over the Years Essay 1.Write a 50 WORD essay about the false premises of journalist Dick Cavett’s question “(What are the Negr

UCI Progress of Black People Over the Years Essay 1.Write a 50 WORD essay about the false premises of journalist Dick Cavett’s question “(What are the Negroes…why aren’t they optimistic?”) in the tv interview with Baldwin? FALSE PREMISE ONE: Black people always complain and play the race card; FALSE PREMISE TWO: Black people don’t know how to stay in their own areas of excellence –urban politics, sports, entertainment, tv commercials. WHY DO YOU THINK IT IS SO HARD FOR MOST PEOPLE TO BELIEVE THAT violence continues to stalk Black people and reduce us to an undifferentiated mass as if we have no beauty, dignity, or value?

2. King explains that Black people have a duty to participate politically through breaking segregation laws. What’s the difference between talking about Black political participation as a right versus as a duty?

3.What is the point of paying close attention to the ideological differences and different organizational histories that the key figures participated in?

Martin (well educated, leadership class of Southern clergy, viewed as voice of the people/leaders that could be negotiated with, accused of being manipulated by communists, accused of being terrorists, organized national campaigns, had the ear of the Attorney General, the President, and many members of Congress, the United Nations, moral suasion and nonviolence)

Malcolm (hyper-minoritized religious community, many members recruitment and devotion associated with self-rehabilitation and striving, many members from the working class/poor/Garveyite internationalist tradition, focus on self determination and economic self-sufficiency, did not appeal to the American moral conscience, self defense)

4.List five of the things Baldwin says he misses about the people who had “paid for him”—or whose ideas about the preciousness of Black life crafted a way in the world for him in the face of Jim Crow?

Medgar (rural highly confrontational, fighting segregation and lynch law, radical local NAACP branch)

James (artist, member of the LGBTQ+ community, lived abroad in France during its period of racial colonialism, moved between all movements, registered voters in the South, raised in Northern poverty, child preacher, his writing was made a mouthpiece for Black America’s suffering and flourishing, used moral suasion and condemned white intransigence)

5. For Baldwin being an actor in the movement included “dealing with the criminal state of Mississippi hour by hour and day by day to say nothing of night after night….sweat[ing] cold sweat after making decisions that involved hundreds of thousands of lives.” As a “witness” what is the work that he must do that is related to the work of those actors in the movement?