Black and White or Black and White; two colors that seem to influence our story more than they should have. Note that I had to capitalize both colors and then put each first because if I had only said one or the other it would have been racist. Even today people think so. Most of the time they are joking or trying to flame someone, but sometimes people are downright racist. Why? Why should the color of someone's skin change who they are or how you look at them? These are two questions that will never be answered. For some strange reason that's just how it is, and how it will always be to a certain extent. It's been like this for so long that it's not even the color of their skin that makes us think differently about these people, but the fact that they were once slaves. This little fact is something no one will ever forget. We have a month of black history. Nobody is forgetting anything. Maybe this is good and maybe bad, but one thing that is certain is the struggle that African Americans faced as soon as they were freed. Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks reflect on the struggles of African Americans during mid-1900s America with the poems The Explorer and Fredrick Douglass. In the poem The Explorer by Gwendolyn Brooks really lets it be known how much white people talked about her and everyone else. other African Americans. There was no escaping the cry of nervous affairs. Everyone was afraid of African Americans or wanted nothing to do with them. This is a poem about how all these African Americans wanted was to find some peace and quiet. To find a place where I can have some hope; hope is something these people needed, even though... middle of paper... they knew if they were waiting for more rights, a different era, or a miracle. Mostly all they were looking for was hope. The Explorer, by Gwendolyn Brooks, and Fredrick Douglass, by Robert Hayden, are both poems that really reflect on how bad African American suffrage was in the mid-1900s. This really explains how bad times were for these people, and if you think about it, how bad times may still be for them. Everyone knows them as those people who were once slaves. Even though they didn't even know their great-grandfather who was freed from slavery. This is how people look at them. No one knew what would happen when they freed the slaves, and no one would know if we would never have slaves or if we still had them. All we know is that these people suffered and that is something that will never be forgotten.