Colored People Essay Research Paper Segregated Peace

Colored People Essay, Research Paper

Segregated Peace: an essay on Colored People

Integration was a main theme or topic in this memoir. It played an important role

in the time when Gates was growing up and had a big affect on him throughout his book.

Integration changed the way Gates viewed, whites, blacks, restaurants, hairstyles, church,

school, etc. He went from a conformist to a rebel to an Episcopal. His community changed

with him and the older generation of course did not take to integration as well as most of

the younger generation did. Integration was considered a good thing to most people and

others believed that Blacks had lost something through the whole ordeal. They believed

that they had lost the close knit family ties that segregation indirectly created. Gates sums

up the way the community felt about integration in one of his last sentences in his memoir.

He writes, .All I know is that Nemo.s corn never tasted saltier, his coffee never smelled

fresher, than when these hundreds of Negroes gathered to say goodbye to themselves,

their heritage, and their sole link to each other, wiped out of existence by the newly

enforced anti-Jim Crow laws..(Gates, 216)

It was hard for blacks to integrate into all white schools after being surrounded by

blacks for most of their lives. Whites weren.t the only ones to critique black attitude and

black style, blacks did it to themselves. Gates writes that when he was a child he

remembered that when blacks were admitted to all white neighborhoods or schools,

Negroes were the first to censure other Negroes(Gates, xiii). His father would say things

like, .Don.t go over there with those white people if all you.re going to do is Jim Crow

yourselves(Gates, xii). Even Gates writes, .I always reserved my scorn….for someone too

dark, someone too loud, and too wrong..(Gates, xiii). The way Gates writes it, blacks

would scrutinize their own kind. Integration wasn.t as easy as going up to a white person

if you were black and saying, .Hi, since were supposed to be integrating with each other I

guess we.ll be friends.. There was extreme racial tension and some whites would just

absolutely not integrate. In Chapter 17 Gates writes about an episode in his life when his

friends and himself try to integrate a local all white dance club. The owner forced the boys

out using violence and the next Monday the club was shut down by the Human Rights

Commission, because the owner wouldn.t integrate. In this incident the owner of the

nightclub closed his place down rather than integrate with the black community. Gates felt

that it was better to have the club be turned into a family restaurant than stay segregated .

Gates felt like a pioneer, someone who was helping out the cause fighting against

segregation and racism. Racism was a major cause of segregation throughout the book.

The view of Piedmont thorough Gates. writing reveals that whites and blacks got

along fine as long as colored people didn.t eat at the Rendezvous Bar, or buy property, or

dance with, date, or dilate upon white people(Gates, 27).This quote represented Gates.

sarcastic view of segregation. What he meant by this was that there wasn.t a problem

between blacks and whites until they started to integrate. Racism was the cause of

segregation throughout Piedmont and prevented blacks from doing a lot of the things

whites could. At the cut-rate, a local diner, blacks were only allowed to order their food

and leave. The proprietor of the diner, Carl Dadisman was very nice to colored people, but

he didn.t want colored people sitting in his booths, eating off his plates….or put their thick

greasy lips all over his glasses(Gates, 18). This quote embodies the attitude of the majority

of whites in Piedmont. It basically states that blacks were only allowed to integrate as far

as the whites would let them because the idea of blacks using the same items whites were

using was disgusting. Blacks were also not allowed to go to school with whites and even

after integration racism still controlled the way blacks were treated. Limits on the

inter-mixing of blacks were established by the school board. These limits were, no holding

hands, one colored cheerleader, one colored teacher, put most of the colored on the B

track, and several more. Gates. brother Rocky was restricted from winning the Golden

Horseshoe award because the hotel where they would have to stay was segregated(Gates,

98). The oppression of the school board of his brother gave Gates perseverance to excel

and win the horseshoe award 6 years later. Gates wanted to bring down the racial barriers

that the whites tried to establish.

As he got older Gates rebelled and started to read black books, grew an Afro, and

started to wear dashikis and beads(Gates, 186), as well as many of the other blacks did.

The black power movement was strong and it was considered great to be black. Blacks of

light complexi

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