Exercise Two

Exercise Two

Re-arrange the following sentences into the correct sequences for a paragraph. Afterward, in your notes, describe why you re-ordered them the way that you did.

Think now of the Southern Negro, driven off the land in increasing numbers today, coming to the Northern city.

He can hardly be compared to previous immigrants, most of whom brought skills with them.

Others took menial work until they could save up and own "a little shop."

The Southern Negro arrives ; is he to pick cotton in Manhattan?

He finds the menial work automated and the "little shop" gobbled up by the supermarkets.

He is, in fact, unemployable -- from the Mississippi Delta to Watts. As for finding work in the new factories of the "changing South," he can forget it ; if anything, those factories will be more automated than others.

As for education, he probably cannot even read or write because Southern Negro elementary schools are that bad.

You have to pass tests to get into college ; he doesn't even have the education to get an education.

Civil rights protest has not materially benefitted the masses of Negroes ; it has helped those who were already just a little ahead.

The main result of that protest has been an opening up of the mobility. Jobs have opened up, but they are mainly the jobs on Madison Avenue or Wall Street - which require education.

Housing has opened up, but mainly in the "better neighborhoods."

In a sense, the Negroes helped by protest have been those who never wanted to be Negroes.

Americans who would point to the occasional Negro in his $30,000 home or his sports car and say, "He made it," should have met the Mississippi lady of color who said to me in 1962: "The food that Ralph Bunche eats doesn't fill my stomach."