Scout's priorities, and her position as one of literature's loudest and most important advocates for civil rights, are still made clear, however subtly, as she smiles joyously within the first paragraph at signs that inequality is beginning to change in her home town: "She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose".
She grinned when she saw her first TV antenna atop an unpainted Negro house; as they multiplied, her joy rose".
"Like Senghor, I would reply, 'I am not a Negro house-boy,' " he said, referring to the country's revered founding president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, who died in 2001.
The unpainted houses are Negro houses, connected to the modern world by television antennae, contemporized thus, but still clearly distinguishable to Jean Louise.
In 1934, the folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wrote, "Jook is a word for a Negro pleasure house," often a "bawdy house" where black workers "dance, drink and gamble".
William Levitt weakly insisted that he would love to sell houses to black families but had "come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95percentt of our white customers will not buy into the community.
"I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family," said William Levitt in 1957, "then 90 to 95percentt of our white customers will not buy into the community".
And he justified this blatant racism as being nothing more than a byproduct of the era, stating that he "knew that if we sold one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95percentt of our white customers will not buy into the community".
He lived off campus with a Negro family & took his meals at their restaurant next to their house.
As a way to mock the passive resisters of the mainstream civil-rights movement, he distinguished between the honest masses, the "field Negroes," and the perfidious "house Negroes," who were forever looking to their white masters for privilege and approval.
You had the house Negro and the field Negro.
