The last five years of my life have been spent at an all guys’ school. The way guys act when there’s no one else around for that long really is different then what others see. The whole “in” group “out” group thing really shows here.

The language used amongst a group of male, 16 year olds with no adult supervision is slightly different then the one used by that group to figures of authority. If you were different then you were made fun of. You wore what everyone else wore. You did what they did. You spoke how they spoke. The new kids quickly learned to act a certain way to become “popular”.
I made a small group of close friends that I hung out with. One of them was a bridge between us and the “popular” kids that kept them from picking on us much. I made sure to have a few people around most of the time. I tried to keep aware of what was going on around me as much as possible, which helped to keep me out of trouble, and avoid the troublemakers. Last year, not paying attention turned out poorly. I didn’t make that mistake again.
Going to that school shaped a lot of my current habits and actions.

Booker T. Washington's Plan

Booker T. Washington’s stand on the problem of what would happen to blacks in the south, after the civil war, was one that whites looked on more favorably then the newly freed slaves. Washington did not want to do anything. His plan was to have the freed slaves return to the work they’d already been doing all their lives, but for pay. While this may seem like a decent idea, because the whites were in no shape to look after everything they had slaves for, and they would already know the trade very well, this would only keep them at the lowly level they were fighting to rise from.

He had the right idea about blacks not leaving the south, because that would give the southerners what they wanted. An all white community where they weren’t disturbed by the blacks. Earning respect and climbing the social ladder would be difficult if things basically just went back to how they were before the slaves were freed. Booker T. Washington’s plan was to do nothing. The south needed some change with the end of the Civil war, and Booker T. Washington would not have brought it.

Powerful

Let me start off with this poem was long and confusing. That said, I found it very interesting. The imagery Brooks uses bring some profound pictures to mind, such as the newspaper rugs. Every day there is a new rug, each with a new headline. How could a place be so poor that they use newspapers as rugs? The things we take for granted, these families would beg for. Grease stains on the wall, and little children clinging to their mother’s aprons in the hallway.

I can picture in my mind babies clad in diapers worn the day before. The ladies walking down the hallway trying not to get any of the filth on their perfectly clean dresses.

The residents of this slum are so dirt-poor, so disgusting, that the ladies from the Ladies Betterment League are reluctant to give them the clean money they raised for these families. They want to find a more “worthy” poor family. The not-so-poor poor.

In the poem, they ask if there’s a way to just mail the money to the families that are so desperately in need of it, so that they don’t actually have to look at the unsightly apartments. If they could just mail the money, then they can say, “Oh, WE donated to these poor families, because that’s how wonderful we are.” Then they don’t have to know how badly off these people really are.

The money they were going to give them would have helped them a great deal, but they need REAL help. The kind that can get them a decent meal every day, and education for their children.