Blog 6 Autobiography Response

So far many of the autobiography's I have read really were interesting and representative of the time period that these people were in. I did have to keep in mind the things we talked about in class and to make sure and read these critically, given that people are more subjective instead of objective. Many autobiography's were based on emotions and feelings relative to that time, but they still painted a picture of the magnitude of reactions resulting from racism. Its hard for me to pick one autobiography out of the many since they were all so interesting, however I did decide to pick Maya Angelou's section out of her novel I know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I really enjoyed how she described her graduation in great postive detail before the ceremony, with a sort of innocence and appreciation. I thought that during the graduation, what the white man was saying really represented the feelings that whites had towards blacks in education at that time. Whites felt that African Americans were only good at sports and could never really achieve the prestige and honor of excelling in science, math, or etc. I feel that this is partly the reason why many African Americans were halted in their education through having run down schools and being basically left on the back burner. I really liked how Maya's class regained that sense of power and resistance to this oppression, when the white man left and the class valedictorian got up and spoke words of a poem. This poem gave hope and power to African Americans, and let them know that nothing was going to stop them from achieving their goals. I really liked this autobiography because it showed African Americans resisting this oppression through education and hard work.