3/7 Blog

After reading through chapters 5 and 6 of Rachel Devlin's A Girl Stands at the Door, I started to think more and more about the qualities and characteristics all of these people had to have in order to persist through that time period. I especially realize it when, on page 150, it says that "These incidents reveal Todd's dominant attributes: she was courageous, pugnacious, and extremely competitive." After reading that sentence and another sentence where it calls her "tough," I understand that those are the ideal traits to have for what her and other black women to have in order for things to actually get done back then. Being black back then obviously was not easy and came with many challenges, but being tough would help you persist. This is what the black leaders needed to have. Toughness. The willpower to fight through adversity such as, constantly being ridiculed for everything that you do and knowing your life is at risk every single day. You had to be competitive. You had to have some sort of drive to always want to win, even when the odds were stacked heavily against you. I think the quote made by Calvin Coolidge titled "Persistence" describes exactly how black people had to be back then in order to succeed. The quote is "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." By not being determined and persistent, especially back then, nothing would have gotten accomplished. All of the people that stuck their necks out there to push for equality and civil rights had these traits, and admire that.

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