Writing Directions
Read the passage above and write a 400-word essay responding to the ideas it presents. In your essay, be sure to summarize the passage in your own words, stating the author’s most important ideas. Develop your essay by identifying the one idea in the passage that you feel is especially significant, and explain its significance. Support your claims with evidence or examples drawn from what you have read, learned in school, and/or personally experienced.
Remember to review your essay and make any changes or corrections that are needed to help your reader follow your thinking. You will have 60 minutes to complete your essay.
Remember: Even though this is an emotional speech, you should approach intellectually. There are several ideas that come through at different points, especially if you 'read between the lines.' Remember the context for this speech: in 1964, African-Americans would just win a legal victory with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This speech was made in the context of white supremacist terrorism, Jim Crow racism, and the Civil Rights Movement. No matter what you argue is the main idea of the speech or its meaning, be sure to take notes and assign, perhaps, a different summary to each paragraph of the speech.
Remember: Even though this is an emotional speech, you should approach intellectually. There are several ideas that come through at different points, especially if you 'read between the lines.' Remember the context for this speech: in 1964, African-Americans would just win a legal victory with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This speech was made in the context of white supremacist terrorism, Jim Crow racism, and the Civil Rights Movement. No matter what you argue is the main idea of the speech or its meaning, be sure to take notes and assign, perhaps, a different summary to each paragraph of the speech.
1964 threatens to be the most explosive year America has ever witnessed. The most explosive year. Why? It's also a political year. It's the year when all of the white politicians will be back in the so-called Negro community jiving you and me for some votes. The year when all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community with their false promises, building up our hopes for a letdown, with their trickery and their treachery, with their false promises which they don't intend to keep. As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion; and now we have the type of black man on the scene in America today -- I'm sorry, Brother Lomax -- who just doesn't intend to turn the other cheek any longer.
Don't let anybody tell you anything about the odds are against you. If they draft you, they send you to Korea and make you face 800 million Chinese. If you can be brave over there, you can be brave right here. These odds aren't as great as those odds. And if you fight here, you will at least know what you're fighting for.
I'm not a politician, not even a student of politics; in fact, I'm not a student of much of anything. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican, and I don't even consider myself an American. If you and I were Americans, there'd be no problem. Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren't Americans yet.
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