Focused Questions Various groups Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Focused Questions Various groups - Coursework Example Jerrel was the older one. â€Å"Identical like twins my sweet pumpkins!†- their mother used to say adoringly. Growing up in the 60s and 70s transitioning era, Cedric and Jerrel saw the decades of struggle for Black rights and liberation yielding fruit. There were various changes that were happening. The Supreme Court passed a ruling that segregation of schools according to races was not constitutional; consequently significant desegregation of schools took place in the latter half of the 1960s. It was exciting for Jerrel and Cedric to befriend â€Å"the White people† and to be treated their equals. The young American African brothers were keen and witty and excelled academically. It was heartening for their parents to see the trend in the 1960s that greater number of Blacks was being enrolled in colleges. Jerrel and Cedric saw their elder cousins, and later on themselves, working their way through respectable colleges and getting good degrees (â€Å"Unrest in the State †, 1974). The Black middle-class family typically characterized of the husband, who had two jobs. If the wife was working, she was not given long maternity leaves after childbirth and had to come back to birth almost after it. Such was the case with Leonard and Sophia. Leonard was a preacher by profession but also used to work in a bakery in the evenings. The extra money that he made from the bakery was used both for small charity works that Leonard did and to provide for the family. Sophia had also been working since before she got married to Leonard. However being a Black, she had tougher work restrictions that her White colleagues. She was given shorter maternity leaves and often complained to her husband of workplace discrimination. Migration trends out of the South continued in the 1960s but the era also witnessed an increment in the relative wages of African American workers. At the start of the 1960s, the average African American with Bachelors received about 60% of the income of their White counterparts (Fuchs, 1990). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is attributed to the gains in wages. Thereby, when Jerrel and Cedric entered professional lives, their mother would gloat with pride at the fact that her sons made a respectable living. The transitioning period of the 60s and 70s was characteristic of a rise in the life expectancy of Blacks and important antidiscrimination initiatives were also undertaken (Backend, 2010). Nevertheless, life for young black men was tough. Most were in prisons when they got their high school equivalency and the number of black men who went to college was significantly less than the number of black women (Welch, Gruhl, Comer & Rigdon, 2008). Despite the problems in the society, Jerrel and Cedric managed to stay out of prison and lead a relatively crime-free youth. Another change that was apparent in the second half of the 20th century was the increase in single-parent Black households. A phenomenon that was seen in African American households in the 1960s was fatherlessnesss. Female-headed households and illegitimacy, although common in the American society, became an accepted norm amongst the Black community (Committee on Appropriations United States Senate, 2005; Schumacher, 2008). Cedric and Jerrel’s family could not stay immune to it for long. However it was not because Leonard followed carnal desires as was common amongst married Blacks. He decided that he wanted to go on a preaching mission. He left his two sons and his wife with some of his savings