CAN ANY1 TURN THIS INTO A MASTERPIECE BC IF YOU CAN YOU GET A COOKIE : ALBD Rough Draft

Cameron Despanza

S8C

2/25/2021

Paragraph 1:
The book A Lesson Before Dying takes place during the Jim Crow era and the author Ernest J. Gaines does an excellent job showing us life during that time in history. This novel is in the 1940s in rural Louisiana where a young man named Jefferson gets sentenced to death for being at the wrong place at the wrong time and teacher Grant Wiggins is sent there to make Jefferson a man and to die with dignity. Jim Crow was a term that applied to all laws that enforce racial segregation in the Southern U. S. The Jim Crow Laws established the principles of the separate but equal thing and were used to create a legal disadvantage for colored people and it made it difficult for them to find jobs and have an equal chance.

Paragraph 2: Thurgood Marshall sought to dismantle segregation in Louisiana’s public schools. He believed that segregated education, and the meager resources allotted for African American children, perpetuated poverty and inequality across generations. In the book and the movie, it’s pretty clear how broken the education system is for African Americans compared to their white counterparts and it’s the same in real life. When Grant Tells Tant Lou and Jeffersons nannan that he is only a teacher who teaches what the white man tells him to teach I think it’s pretty clear that the schooling system was broken at the time.

Paragraph 3:Back then the Justice System was broken because as long as it was a black man, he was guilty. Just like Jefferson, he got death only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Homer Plessy, an active member of a New Orleans civil rights organization, the Comité de Citoyens, bought a first-class ticket on a train and attempted to sit among whites. After he was arrested for breaking the law, Plessy sued the railroad company, his lawyers arguing that segregation denied him equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1896, however, the US Supreme Court upheld Louisiana law in its decision on Plessy vs. Ferguson.” The reason they arrested Homer Plessy is because of the Jim Crow Laws applied to African Americans

Conclusion: In the book, A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
, it explains the everyday life and struggles in the 50s and 60s. Those years represent the Civil Rights movement. The book takes place in Louisiana, which was a state where African Americans were slaves and had little to no rights. The Civil Rights movement needed real heroes who could stand up for not only themselves but for others also. Jefferson, an African American boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, witnessed a murder but got blamed for it because he was black. In order to convince the jury that he is innocent, his lawyer called him a hog in from of the judge in the court, claiming that killing him on the electrical chair does nothing, just like if there was a hog in that chair. Jefferson died like a man, but those like Grant, who was a school teacher,
are the real heroes, not only he stood up for Jefferson but also he represented the whole African-American community.