At the Foster-Foreman Conference we listed to Pulitzer prize winner Douglas Blackmon speak about his career in the media and news world. Throughout his speech he discussed topics such as racism, race relations, and traveling to other places within the world where he experienced culture all within the 20th century.
Hearing him read passages from his novel, as well as hearing some of his emotional experiences really helped me as well as other listeners feel a personal connection to Blackmon’s life and made the lecture more entertaining.
Where as I don’t personally relate to his discussion of poverty, having grown up in a middle class white household, in my home town of Wilmington, North Carolina I was witness to the economic divide between the classes. The majority of the lower economic class was African American. I think the topics he spoke upon from the Civil War to World War 2 are still prevalent today and his speech focuses on points that are valid, not only across the country, but through out a broader spectrum of history that he directly refers to. He only cites a certain time period but the entire discussion and “its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end” easily represents “the paradoxes of current American life.”
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