112 pages • 3 hours read
Jesmyn WardA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“The Tradition” by Jericho Brown
Introduction by Jesmyn Ward
“Homegoing, AD” by Kima Jones
“The Weight” by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
“Lonely in America” by Wendy S. Walters
“Where Do We Go from Here?” by Isabel Wilkerson
“‘The Dear Pledges of Our Love’: A Defense of Phillis Wheatley’s Husband” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
“White Rage” by Carol Anderson
“Cracking the Code” by Jesmyn Ward
“Queries of Unrest” by Clint Smith
“Blacker Than Thou” by Kevin Young
“Da Art of Storytellin’ (a Prequel)” by Kiese Laymon
“Black and Blue” by Garnette Cadogan
“The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” by Claudia Rankine
“Know Your Rights!” by Emily Raboteau
“Composite Pops” by Mitchell S. Jackson
“Theories of Time and Space” by Natasha Trethewey
“This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution” by Daniel José Older
“Message to My Daughters” by Edwidge Danticat
Key Figures
Themes
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Important Quotes
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People might have assumed the Civil Rights era put an end to pervasive and institutional racism, but events such as the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown suggest this is not the case. Wilkerson describes the “continuing feedback loop” (59) that sees progress for civil rights, followed by a great downtrend, and repetition of these trends. The “Nadir” (59) describes a precipitous downtrend after the progress of post-Civil War, post-slavery Reconstruction in the United States. This Nadir saw the enactment of Jim Crow laws and the lynching of African Americans during the decades following Reconstruction.
Black Americans reacted to Jim Crow by fleeing the South in the Great Migration, but the North also treated them with institutional resistance via “redlining, overpolicing, hyper-segregation, the seeds of the disparities we see today” (60). In these and other movements, Wilkerson observes a downtrend in the civil rights loop. Incidents of police violence against unarmed black people now outnumber lynchings during Jim Crow. The black community must assess this long series of injustices to face the future with courage, compassion, and endurance.
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By Jesmyn Ward