Town Hall

 Town Hall (meeting)

In class we had to pick a leader in history who represented and stood for the rights of people. I chose Lucretia Mott. In this speech we had to play the person we choose and say what they beleve and play them as if they were talking in a town hall meeting.

Friends, I thank thee for the chance to stand before thee this evening.

I was raised among Friends — thee knows this word, "Quaker" — and from the time I was a small girl, I was taught a simple truth: that the Light of God dwells in every soul alike. Not in some souls more than others. Not in the master more than the servant, nor the rich man more than the poor. Every soul, equal, and every soul free.

I did not come to this belief by reading it in a book, though I have read many. I came to it by watching. When I was young, I taught school for a time, and I found that the young women who taught alongside me were paid but half of what the young men were paid, for the very same work. It seemed a small wrong beside the great wrong of slavery — and yet it planted a seed in me. For once a body sees that unfairness can be written into the very rules of a place, dressed up as custom, as "the way things are done" — that body cannot help but look further, and ask: what other wrongs have we simply agreed to stop noticing?

And so I looked further, Friends. I looked at the South, and I looked at our own North too, for we are not
so innocent as we like to think. I looked at men and women bought and sold like sacks of grain. I looked at children torn from their mothers' arms and carried off to be sold at auction, never to be seen again. I looked at the sugar in our bowls and the cotton on our backs, and I asked myself — whose hands picked this? Whose back was bent to grow it? And what price did they pay, that we might have it cheap?

I could not look upon these things and call myself a follower of the Light, and stay silent. Silence, Friends, is its own kind of speech. It says: I am comfortable, and comfort is enough for me. But comfort is not enough. Not while a single soul in this land is held as property instead of person.

Some tell me this is not a woman's place to speak on such matters. That I ought to leave the great questions to the men, and busy myself elsewhere. I say to thee plainly — if the house is on fire, I do not ask permission to cry out. And this house, this whole nation, is on fire with the sin of slavery, and every one of us, man and woman both, is called to carry water.

I have heard it argued that this is a matter for the Southern states alone, that we in the North ought not meddle in it. But Friends, a wrong done to one soul is a wrong against every soul, for we are none of us free while others are chained. This is not merely their sin to answer for. It is ours, so long as we buy what their bondage produces, and look away from how it is made.

So I ask of thee tonight — not thy pity, for pity changes nothing. I ask thy conviction. Speak of this in thy
homes. Refuse the goods grown by unpaid hands, when thee is able. Open thy doors to those who flee northward seeking freedom. And above all — do not let comfort silence thee, as it has silenced so many good people before.

I believe, with my whole heart, that the day will come when this nation looks back and wonders how it ever tolerated such a thing. Let us be among those who did not wait for that day to arrive before we spoke.

I thank thee for thy patience in hearing me.

40 Acres and a Mule

 40 Acres and a Mule

The Promise That Almost Was In January 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman met with 20 Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, and issued Special Field Order No. 15 — setting aside roughly 400,000 acres of confiscated coastal land, from Charleston, SC, to Florida, divided into 40-acre plots for newly freed Black families.

The mule came later, when the Army lent surplus pack animals to help settlers work the land. Around 40,000 freedpeople settled within months, building self-governing communities like the one on Skidaway Island. But the land titles were only possessory, not permanent, a wartime measure, not real ownership.

That made the whole promise dependent on federal oversight staying in place.It didn't. After Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson took office, treated the order as a temporary wartime measure, and ordered confiscated land returned to former Confederate owners. By 1867, nearly all the freed families had been evicted and pushed into sharecropping — a system that often left Black families in cycles of debt to the same landowners their ancestors had been enslaved by Special Field Order No. 15 didn't fail on its own merits — it was reversed by a change in political leadership. That's why it still resonates today: it represents the road not taken.

What strikes me most about Special Field Order No. 15 is
how close it came to reshaping American history — and how fragile that closeness turned out to be. Forty thousand families didn't just receive land; they built governance, agriculture, and community infrastructure in a matter of months, proving the promise wasn't utopian but entirely workable. The undoing wasn't a failure of the freedpeople or the policy's design — it was a single presidential transition and a legal technicality about "possessory" titles.

In my view, this is what makes the story so haunting: it wasn't inevitable. Reconstruction's broader collapse gets treated as historical fate, but Sherman's order shows there was a functioning alternative on the ground, actively working, before it was dismantled by political will alone. That distinction matters — between a policy that couldn't work and one that wasn't allowed to continue.

Final

 Good morning, everyone. Today I want to talk about two things that ended up being connected in ways I didn't expect: my DIS1000 class on freedom, and the Summer Advantage program that brought me to High Point University a full summer before my first real semester.

What Talking about freedom Taught Me About Freedom

Before this class, I thought I understood what freedom meant. I could have given you a dictionary definition the right to do what you want without being controlled. But my talking about freedom class showed me that freedom is a lot more historical, than that.

One of the biggest things I took away from this class was a real understanding of the 14th Amendment and the history behind it. I honestly didn't know much about it beyond the name. Through this class, I learned how central it is to American freedom how the 14 admendment redefined citizenship, guaranteed equal protection under the law, and became the foundation for so many later fights for civil rights.Understanding the 14th Amendment didn't just teach me a historical fact. It changed how I think about freedom as something that had to be built, amendment by amendment, court case by court case — not something that just existed from the start.That connects to one of my favorite parts of the class: the timelines. We built out four different timelines over the semester, and each one told a different piece of the American story.

Seeing history laid out visually like that, in order, made everything click in a way that reading a textbook
never did. It wasn't abstract anymore. I could see the shape of it.

The movie days helped with that too. Watching films tied to what we were learning gave me a clearer picture of what these historical moments actually looked and felt like, and how directly they connect to where we are now. It's one thing to read about a time period. It's another to watch it and realize how the world we live in today grew directly out of it.

On top of the history itself, this class helped me personally. I used to get nervous presenting in front of people. Because I was with the same group of students five days a week, I got comfortable fast. I wasn't presenting to strangers  I was presenting to people I saw every day, who were figuring it out right alongside me. By the end, I wasn't just less nervous. I actually knew how to improve my presenting, not just survive it

What Summer Advantage Gave Me

The class was only half of the picture. The other half was Summer Advantage itself — the chance to actually live at HPU a full summer before my
real first semester even began.

The biggest thing was getting to see the same faces every single day, five days a week. There's something about that kind of repetition that builds trust fast. By the second or third week, these weren't just people I recognized from class — they were people I actually knew. I wasn't guessing who to sit next to or worrying about walking into a room alone. That comfort carried into everything else I did that summer.

Living together made that even stronger. When you're not just seeing people in class but sharing meals with them, hanging out after hours, and figuring out the small day-to-day stuff of being somewhere new — together — the friendships move faster and go deeper. I ended up with a group of genuinely good friends, some who already feel like family to me. I didn't expect to be able to say that after only a few weeks, but that's exactly what happened.

By the time the real fall semester rolled around, I wasn't walking onto campus as a stranger. I already knew people. I already knew my way around. I already knew what it felt like to sit in an HPU classroom and speak up without hesitation. Summer Advantage didn't just get me ahead academically — it gave me a head start on the part of college that's harder to prepare for: actually feeling like I belonged there.

Looking back, talking about freedom taught me about freedom in a way that felt real through the 14th Amendment, through the timelines, through watching history unfold on screen instead of just reading about it. And Summer Advantage taught me about myself, how I handle new places, new people, and how much faster I grow when I'm not doing it alone
.

Thank you.

 Reaction to EOTO

Writing this blog post about “40 Acres and a Mule”

helped me better understand an important part of Reconstruction that I did not know much about before. Before researching this topic, I had heard the phrase “40 Acres and a Mule,” but I never knew where it came from or why it was so significant. Learning that the federal government actually promised land to formerly enslaved people, only to take that opportunity away a short time later, was surprising and disappointing.

In my opinion, the promise of land could have completely changed the lives of many freed families. After centuries of slavery, owning land would have given people the chance to support themselves, build wealth, and create a better future for their children. Instead, when President Andrew Johnson returned the land to former Confederate owners, many Black families lost the opportunity to become independent. They were forced into sharecropping, which often kept them trapped in poverty and debt. I think this decision had long-lasting effects that continued for generations.

One part of this topic that stood out to me the most was that the original order never actually promised a mule. I had always assumed the phrase was written into the order, but I learned that the mules came later when the Army loaned surplus animals to help settlers work the land. It showed me how history can sometimes be misunderstood or simplified over time.

Researching this topic also made me realize how one government decision can affect people for decades. The failure to follow through on the promise of land ownership contributed to economic inequality that historians still discuss today. While no one can change what happened in the past, I think it is important to learn about these events so we can better understand why certain issues still exist.

Overall, I enjoyed researching this topic because it taught me something new and challenged what I thought I already knew. It reminded me that history is not just about memorizing dates and events but about understanding how decisions impact real people. This blog post gave me a greater appreciation for the importance of keeping promises and recognizing how historical events continue to influence society today.

Gone with the wind

Gone with the Wind Reflection

Gone with the Wind is a movie made in 1939 Also with a book published in 1936. The story is
told from Scarlett O’Hara the daughter of a wealthy Georgia plantation owner as she navigates love loss and survival during the different periods of the war before, during and after the war. The movie follows her life from being from the south through the burning of Atlanta and the crash of confederacy and then into the tribulation of reconstruction. During the time when the movie was released it rose to become one of the most popular films ever released and still remains a very moving film. 

This film relates directly to how the history we have learned over in our talking about freedom class because it discusses the civil war and reconstruction from the point of view of a white southern planter class level. It shows the destruction of Atlanta and economic collapse of the plantation system and then the social disruption after the war. This film reflects this narrative and mostly talks about enslaved characters that are portrayed as loyal content. 

My opinion of this movie was both good and bad and I will go into detail why. On one hand I really appreciated this movie Gone With the Wind because it was very technical and cinematic. For a film made and released when it was in production and cinematography, Scarlett O’Hara’s multifaceted character was really fantastic. It also greatly matters historically because it explains to us in detail how white Americans in the 1930s wanted to remember that period in time. Studying  as a primary class of cultural memory rather than as a reliable record makes it more valuable. On the other hand I think that this film is dangerous in that way when it is watched uncritically. This is because it is really entertaining and emotionally engaging, this leads it to shape how generations of Americans have an inaugural picture of the way history played out. They did inaccurately portray slavery in history because it resented slavery as just a background detail and the love story as the main story. 

Overall my opinion about gone with the wind is worth studying but not as a realizable history

resource. It should be approached as a case study in the popularity of the media and can reinforce a comfortable but false version of the past and why it is important to disconnect the movie from the accurate history of what happened. While watching it critically, having those facts in my head of history and the reconstruction makes the movie more valuable in this class because it shows how words and history can be manipulated and twisted. His movie's popularity did real cultural work because it didn't just reflect lost cause ideology it helped share and prove to Americans for generations for years to come. If we only study history through documents and textbooks we miss how much of what people may believe about the past may come from unfactual sources like movies. 

The heat in the night

 Reflection on the Heat in the night movie.

The heat of the night is a crime drama set in 1967 in a small town called Sparta Mississippi. This movie is
meant to tell the story about a murder in Sparta and how Bill Gillespie, a police chief, was quick to arrest the first person he sees that could be the perpetrator, Virgil Tibbs. Tibbs was actually visiting his mother in Sparta and is actually a homicide detective and was wrongfully arrested. People soon found out that he was a detective and wanted to add him to the case to help figure out who the perpetrator was. However, since Tibbs was African American, Bill Gillespie wasn't too happy to be working alongside him on the case 

I really liked how this film showed a point in history that not many people talk about as much as slavery. This movie focuses on the time after slavery and shows how white individuals  aren't directly discriminating against African Americans but they still aren't accepted and trusted within their lives. This point in time wasn't forgotten but sometimes gets pushed to the side when being talked about 

This film may show how Tibbs the African American in the film but also celebrities how african america got more freedoms and were even allowed to work alongside a white man. This was big back then because not too long before the movie was made African Americans were not allowed to sit in the same vicinity as white people so have an African American play a major role in a movie alongside white people is a big deal.

One part of this movie that took me back was the infamous slap. Not only was i shocked but i did some research after about and so was everyone else in history. After Tibbs was slapped by wealthy plantation owner  Eric Endicott, he wasn't pleased about working alongside an African American. The part that really made everyone gasp was when Tibbs returned the slap right back to Eric. This part was very shocking back then because this was one of the first times especially in a movie that an African American fought back. African Americans technically had freedom but still were not treated equally as white people. This also shocked people when it first came out because yes african america were present in movies but mainly played maids servants and very low and small roles, so Tibbs being a main character really stood out.

They quoted the slap as “the slap heard around the world”, because it had such a big movement. 

This movie also shows the progress of the equality of african americans, because it starts off as an african american being wrongfully accused of a murder for simply just bein their, to ending it with him being respected and trusted more then the white detectives because he didn't jump to conclusion. Another reason I liked this movie was because it talked about the message more of history itself. It resembles how slaves had to slowly earn their freedom over time, Tis had to earn his respect in a town and work with people that didn't want to work alongside him.  

Plessy V Furguson

Plessy V Ferguson 

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May it please the Court. Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railway on June 7th, 1892, holding a valid first-class ticket, and was ordered into a separate car for one reason only: the color of his skin. We are here to argue that Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890 violates two amendments this nation ratified specifically to end that kind of state-sanctioned racial rank — the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth Amendments. **First, the Thirteenth Amendment.** This amendment did not simply abolish the buying and selling of human beings. It abolished the incidents of slavery — every remnant of the system that marked one class of citizens as inferior to another under law. A statute that orders citizens into separate railcars, enforced by criminal penalty, based purely on ancestry, revives exactly that kind of badge. It tells the traveling public, by force of law, that colored citizens are unfit to sit beside white ones. That is not a neutral regulation. That is a caste marker, and the Thirteenth Amendment was written to forbid it. **Second, the Fourteenth Amendment.** Section One guarantees every citizen the equal protection of the laws and forbids any state from abridging the privileges and immunities of citizenship. Mr. Plessy is a citizen of Louisiana and of the United States. The right to travel on a public conveyance, on equal terms with every other paying passenger, is one of the most basic privileges of that citizenship. Louisiana cannot use the railroads — corporations chartered under state law and holding themselves out as common carriers to the entire public — as instruments of racial separation. This Court does not have to take our word for how seriously it should treat racial classifications by the state. It has already ruled on this question. In **Strauder v. West Virginia** (1880), this Court struck down a law barring Black citizens from jury service, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees freedom from "discrimination which implies legal inferiority in civil society" — a brand, in the Court's own words, that is "practically a badge" of inferiority stamped on a class of citizens by the law itself. That is precisely what the Separate Car Act does to Mr. Plessy. It does not merely separate; it *ranks*. It tells every passenger, and every conductor, which race the law considers worthy of the better car. We would also direct the Court's attention to the deprivation of property without due process. Being classified and treated as white carries real, tangible value in daily and civil life — the "master-key," as counsel has put it, that opens doors of opportunity. Louisiana's statute lets a train conductor make that determination on sight, with no hearing, no standard, and no appeal, and then criminally punishes the passenger for disagreeing. That is a taking of a valuable civil status without due process of law, guaranteed against by the Fourteenth Amendment's own text. Finally, we would remind the Court that the Fourteenth Amendment was written in the plain language of universal citizenship. It draws no line between races. A law that does draw such a line — that assigns rights and burdens by ancestry alone — cannot be squared with an Amendment whose entire purpose was to strike race from the law of the land. For these reasons, we ask this Court to hold the Separate Car Act unconstitutional, and to affirm that the Constitution protects one class of citizens, not two. Thank you.

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AI DISCLOSER; for this AI assisted assignment I used valued aid to do history research on my topic. After prompting the tool to do research based only on academic and other high-quality sources, I asked Claude to shape the material in the form of a script for an oral presentation of four minutes. I then asked Claude to shape the material in the form of a blog post of between 500 and 600 words. I edited the AI output for reliability. I also policed the linked sources for quality control. To the log post, I added visual elements and links to sources. I also made sure the paragraphs were short and in a personal style.

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