CL 2/27

• Morgan
• Claim–He believed that whites were superior to the African race.
• Reasons– He did not want blacks to get the right to vote.
• Evidence– He believes that blacks will use their vote to show their resentment towards white southern people. He gives an example of Haiti and Jamaica, and that they drove out white people.
• Warrant– He believe that the African race was not as civilized as the white race
• Counterargument–Whites are not superior to any other race. All races deserve equal rights.
• Rebuttal– He would say that the flaw in that argument is that everyone else believes that Africans are inferior, so it is true.

Rhetorical Appeals Du Bois

Du Bois used pathos in his essay. He appealed to emotion through storytelling and expressing the idea that all African Americans want is to really be free and have opportunities.

He used logos when he talks about the history of African Americans. His evidence is in first-person, which is called anecdotal evidence. He talks briefly about how the war and Ku Klux Klan affected them. And, how they were hopeful when the fifteenth amendment was passed. However, he then talks about how their votes were suppressed and how ballot boxes were stuffed.

He uses logos and pathos, because he wants to talk about the emotions tied to his experience. At this time there were very few African Americans that published their feelings, thoughts and experience. He had to rely on his own experience.

The purpose of this essay is to provide a voice for African Americans. He wants to how African Americans have to strive, because they are not given the same opportunities. He wants people to see that even though they are free from slavery, that they are not really free.

The context of the writer when he wrote the essay is important. He wrote this in 1897. In 1897, he worked at the University of Atlanta(all black school). He wrote his first book a year before he published this essay. His first book was, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade(1896). This essay was put into his book, The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. A year before Du Bois’s essay was published, there was a court case.  Plessy v. Ferguson established separate but equal. Even though, Du Bois did not exactly talk about this, his essay can be seen as a response to the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. The decision of separate but equal relates to what Du Bois talks about when he says that they are free but not really living in freedom. He later was apart of the NAACP(1909) which helped reverse the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision.