While reading the Opportunity by Charles Johnson the passages that stood out to me were The Corner By Eunice Hunton Carter(pg 114) and The High Cost of Keeping the Negro Inferior By John C. Wright (pg 116) because of the element of perspective each passage held. How in Carter’s The Corner from the very beginning to the end we can see the different lifestyles lived from. the very first paragraph “My friend lives in the house on the corner. She lives high above the street in a doll’s house of white enamel and soft blues with lovely old furniture and oriental rugs of faded brilliance on dark polished floors; in a miniature home with a real fireplace and polished grasses and flowers all about in crystal bowls. All of this is just a viewpoint from a child. who then goes on by seeing how one by one car move from the city to different parts of new york after a day’s work, they were going home to their “haunts “ compared to the “castle” in the beginning. How even though the night was coming to an end the city was still alive with people with cars horns with lights. How people move so fast they’re missing out on what’s happening right in front of them, “the young boy in the corner dancing and singing the man without legs wheeled himself along on a wooden platform and with an instrument or two gave the effect of a whole brass” how we even still this today street performers. This can tie to how The first modern jazz band ever heard in New York play and sing a dancing orchestra making the first dominant use of banjos, saxo-phones, clarinets and trap drums in combination in The Marshall, one can only wonder if the performers at The Marshall started off this way. Comparing this to Survey Graphic: Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro “The Making of Harlem” by James Weldon Johnson Harlem how it a “city within a city” how “a stranger is struck with surprise at the transformation which takes place after he crosses One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street” (Johnson, page 635) where in both reading we can see how easily communities can change from just a turn of a corner or across a bridge

 

The High Cost of Keeping the Negro Inferior By John C. Wright (pg 116) stood out to me makes the quotes in the passage are because of perspective and how with the information provided make a false seem truth how The majority of white Americans have little knowledge of black people, but the info provided about or the “stats” collected around the prison population “Negro is naturally trifling, dishonest, low and vicious” To keep them inferior they must be huddled in segregated ghettos without drainage, light, pavements, or modern sanitary conveniences they must be denied justice and the right to make a decent living. They must be insulted and bullied and mobbed, discriminated against in public places, and denied access to parks and recreational centers” DuBois magazines cover the crisis to showcase different approaches to show another perspective.” to quote Elizabeth Carroll “The Crisis offers a different collective portrait of African Americans and demonstrates that the changing identity of African Americans necessitated changes in American society and the functioning of American institutions,”(Objectivity and Social Change: Essays and News Stories in Opportunity Anne Elizabeth Carroll, Word, Image, and the New Negro : Representation and Identity in the Harlem Renaissance) This makes one think how information represents identity…….