In the Heat Reflection

 

The movie "In the Heat of the Night" is about a black Philadelphia homicide
detective falsely accused of murder who is forced to collaborate with a chief
and solve the mystery.

My First Thoughts

I thought the film "In the Heat" was an overall enjoyable movie to watch. I thought it was very suspenseful, fun, and exciting to watch. I never really got bored watching it and I usually do when I watch movies. I thought this movie related to our class because it showed American racism. It was interesting to see a murder mystery set in a segregated town during the time of racism. 

'Separate but Equal'

I thought the movie did a really good job on showing how segregation was never about equality. In the movie, when it shows Virgil Tibbs walking into the police station, you could just see on everyone's faces, the whole town was jealous and hated that he was somehow smart and more professional than all of them. It was so obvious seeing the hatred coming from the town around him. I could tell that the town really wasn't a calm utopia like everyone wanted.

 I feel like the movie made it obvious to the viewers that it was actually just a town with horrible racism that no one could escape. The movie made it clear that the term 'separate but equal' just makes no sense. In the town, it was obvious that the white people were treated like they held some sort of high power, while everyone else was treated like nothing. I believe the movie did a really good job in showing how badly people were treated during this time and how our system just overall made life depressing for them.

EOTO Reaction

 

The Reconstruction era was the post-Civil War period from 1865 to 1877.

Reconstruction: A Promise Made, a Promise Tested

When the Civil War ended in 1865, about four million people were free, but freedom was only the beginning. Reconstruction was a period of real progress, and also of fierce resistance.

Legal milestones

The 13th Amendment (December 1865) abolished slavery nationwide, making emancipation permanent law. The 14th Amendment (1868) established birthright citizenship, equal protection, and due process, overturning Dred Scott (1857). The 15th Amendment (1870) barred states from denying the vote based on race. Black men entered Congress, about 2,000 Black officeholders were elected, and new public schools followed. Joseph H. Rainey, born enslaved, became the first Black U.S. representative, representing South Carolina.

Building a new life

Freedom also meant resources. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 (January 1865) set aside coastal land for formerly enslaved families, the origin of “40 acres and a mule,” though it was only a temporary

wartime measure. Education became a symbol of independence. Black communities raised money for teachers and supplies, with help from the Freedmen’s Bureau and Northern missionaries. In 1881, Tuskegee University was founded in Alabama to train Black teachers and provide higher education.

The backlash

 Almost immediately, the Black Codes appeared. Starting in Mississippi in 1865, nearly every Southern state had its own version by 1866. Vagrancy laws let authorities arrest unemployed Black people and sell their labor, while labor contracts and apprenticeship laws tied workers and children to white employers. It was slavery in everything but name. The 1877 withdrawal of federal troops weakened protection further, bringing more violence from white supremacist groups and a loss of Black political influence.

Organizing for justice

Activists kept pushing. The National Equal Rights League formed in 1864, the Niagara Movement in 1905, and after the 1908 Springfield violence, the National Negro Committee brought Black activists and white allies together. It became the NAACP.

Reconstruction’s story is one of gains won, and how fragile they were without enforcement.

AI DISCLOSURE: AI was used during this assignment. I took notes during class while the EOTO teams presented their slides. I then put my notes into Claude AI and asked it to form a blogpost using just the notes I gave it. Then, I went in and added pictures, captions, and links.

Reconstruction Documentary Reflection

The Reconstruction era was the post-Civil War effort from 1865 to 
1877 to reintegrate the South and secure civil rights for freed African Americans.

Reconstructing America: Takeaways from the Reconstruction Era Documentary

After the Civil War came Reconstruction, an era lasting decades. A class documentary told its true story: how American society tried to come to terms with the war’s consequences, which the North and South saw very differently.

Freedom Begins

On April 9, 1865, Palm Sunday, the Civil War ended and the enslaved were freed. By summer, many found a safe haven. Their actions converted many Americans to emancipation, and freeing them strengthened the Union and the military.

Lincoln and Johnson

President Abraham Lincoln gave a speech suggesting all Black men deserved the right to vote. John Wilkes Booth killed him for it, and Andrew Johnson was sworn in as the first president to follow an assassination. 

Johnson believed the planter class caused the war. Frederick Douglass doubted him and could tell Johnson did not like African Americans. 

The Freedmen’s Bureau

In 1865, Oliver Howard created the Freedmen’s Bureau to ensure fair treatment and fair relations between Black and white people. The Bureau held a lot of land, but within weeks the plans fell apart. Johnson undermined the results of the war, sure he could handle Reconstruction perfectly. When people he had hated came asking forgiveness, he ordered Howard to restore all the land to the Confederates. The freed people refused to leave and began singing, and Howard was devastated.

Violence and a Bold New Phase

The South was devastated, its economy destroyed and families torn apart by Confederates who never cared about freeing the enslaved. Meanwhile, freed people moved from farms to cities. The crowds angered white Southerners, who began shooting at them and hunting Black people. By spring, Republicans were in control, and the 14th Amendment, extending rights to all Americans, became law in July.

Election Day

On November 3rd, white gangs terrorized Black voters in New Orleans, and African Americans armed themselves to vote. Still, every Southern state voted for Ulysses S. Grant, who crushed the Confederacy.

Final Thoughts

Reconstruction brought freedom and new rights, but violence pushed back, and Jim Crow later stripped African Americans of those rights.

AI DISCLOSURE: AI was used during this assignment. I took ample notes while watching a documentary about Reconstruction. I then copy and pasted my notes into Claude AI and asked it to form my notes into a blog post without using any other research. Then, I went in and added the pictures, captions, and links.

Revise: GWTW Movie Reflection

"Gone with the Wind" is an epic historical romance starring Scarlett O'Hara,
through the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era in Georgia.

What Happens

In the first half of the film "Gone with the Wind" it starts off in the pre-Civil War era. The film mainly focused on the main character, Scarlett O'Hara. While the film is showing Scarlett starting drama over a boy at a barbecue, the world hears about the war that has officially started. The film shifts from everyone not having a care in the world to all of a sudden the audience could visually see tensions raised across everyone on the screen. 

While the Civil War is happening, the film focuses on Scarlett loosing her way of life at her family's plantation. It shows her hardships going through having no money and starvation for the first time in her life. She soon realizes that she cannot physically live like this anymore. The film ends with Scarlett swearing in a big open field that she would do anything it takes to change her life around and never be starving again.

My Favorite Character

One of my favorite characters in the film was Mammy. I thought Mammy was the best character out of all of them because I liked that she knew what she wanted and had her life together all the way from the very beginning of the film. It felt like she was the only one who kept her composure and had her life together. 

I think that it was clear that she was the leader of the family and without her they would all fall apart. I also liked how she was the only person to call Scarlett's bad behavior out and she never let it slide past her. All the other characters were to afraid to step up and say something. I liked how Mammy didn't care. 

Mammy was still going through the same thing as everyone else during the war and she kept her composure and lead her family with greatness and dignity throughout it all. I felt very inspired by her character.

What was Fictionalized

I believe that in some parts of the movie the filmmakers looked over some important factors about that time of slavery. I think the film didn't show enough bad parts of slavery, which is really important to see to be able to understand how bad slavery really was at that time. I think the movie could have shown important things at the time like poverty and family separation because that was a huge part of slavery.

Scarlett O'Hara

The main character Scarlett O'Hara, played by the actress Vivien Leigh was very good. In the start of the film I did not like her character. I didn't like how it seemed that she only cared about what boys thought about her and she just seemed like every other normal girl. By the end of the movie I started to like her a little more. She started becoming more aware of herself and the abilities she had. 

While she was going through poverty and starvation she realized that her life should be so much more than this. I like how she realized that she needed to step up and do something about it in order to change her life around and get what she knows she deserves. 

Concluding Thoughts

I honestly went into this movie blind. I had heard about it before and didn't really have any interest in ever watching it. But overall, the movie exceeded my expectations and was way better than I thought it was going to be. I liked the characters, the acting, the style of fashion, and the way it helped me better understand what was going on during that era.

Trial Plessy V. Ferguson

 

Plessy V. Ferguson was a landmark Supreme Court case that ruled state-mandated 
racial segregation was constitutional under the "separate but equal" doctrine.

When most people think of Plessy v. Ferguson, they think of constitutional law: the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, state police powers, the phrase “separate but equal.”

But there was another argument running underneath the legal one, a moral and religious argument, and it was just as fierce.

What Happened

On June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy was arrested for violating Louisiana’s 1890 law requiring separate railway cars. The arrest was deliberate. A committee of New Orleans citizens organized it to challenge the law in court.  By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, oral arguments were held on April 13, 1896. The ruling came on May 18. 

Plessy’s lead attorney was Albion Tourgée, a former Union soldier and judge. His legal case rested on the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. But Tourgée was also a writer who explored social justice from a Christian perspective in a novel published in 1890. 

What the Law Was Saying

Plessy’s side argued that the law was not neutral. It marked Black citizens with a “badge of servitude,” carrying forward the heritage of slavery. 

That is a legal claim, but it is also a moral one. A law that tells one group of people they must sit apart doesn’t just move them. It tells them, and everyone watching, what they are worth.

The Scriptural Case

Opponents of segregation had plenty of Scripture to draw on, and these were the passages most often invoked:

Acts 17:26, which says God made all nations “of one blood.”

Acts 10, where Peter, after his vision, enters the home of a Gentile named Cornelius. Later readers saw this as bearing directly on the question of segregated churches. 

Galatians 3:28, which says there is neither Jew nor Greek, because all are one in Christ.

Ephesians 2:14, which speaks of breaking down “the dividing wall of hostility.” 

The common thread is simple. If all people share one origin and one standing before God, a statute that ranks them by race has a hard time claiming divine approval.

The Other Side 

It would be a mistake to treat this as faith versus secularism. Both sides quoted the same book.

Defenders of racial separation also cited Scripture. Confederate-era clergy such as James Henley Thornwell and Robert Lewis Dabney argued that Babel and Acts 17:26’s “bounds of habitation” reflected a divine intent for separation. After emancipation, historians have found that white Christians reconfigured these claims into religious justifications for segregation.

 

So the moral argument against segregation had to do two jobs. It had to affirm what Scripture says about human unity, and it had to answer how its opponents were reading the same text.

Black Churches Already Making the Argument

It’s tempting to picture these arguments as coming from sympathetic lawyers. In fact, Black Christians had been making them for decades.

Research on the post-emancipation South shows that Christian arguments and organizations gave newly freed African Americans strong strategies for claiming civil and political rights and denouncing injustice. And as Jim Crow took hold, Black church leaders decried its arrival while debating how best to resist it. 

Tourgée’s brief was primarily constitutional, and its moral and religious dimension was part of a much wider movement that his clients and their communities understood well.

Why It Still Matters

The Court ruled against Plessy, and “separate but equal” stood for nearly sixty years.

But the moral argument didn’t disappear. It was waiting. The same texts, the same appeals to human unity, and the same refusal to accept a legal badge of inferiority would shape the movement that finally overturned the doctrine in 1954. In 1896, the argument lost in court. It did not lose in conscience.

AI DISCLOSURE: AI was used during this assignment. I put my presentation script into Claude AI and asked it to help me shape it into the form of a BlogPost. Then, I went in and added links and pictures with captions.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist who actively supported the Underground
Railroad and wrote the best-selling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

My name is Harriet Beecher Stowe. I am a minister's daughter, a minister's wife,

and the mother of seven children. I have been called a meddler, a fanatic,

and a disturber of the public peace.

I will answer to all of it.

For eighteen years I lived in Cincinnati, on the north bank of the Ohio River. Across that water lay Kentucky. Across that water lay slavery. I could stand on the shore and look at a country where a man is sold at auction, where a woman is made to bear children for another man's profit, and where the law calls it property.

[Pause.]

In 1849 the cholera came through our city, and it took my Charley. He was eighteen months old. I held him while he died. And I have said since, and I say to you now — "It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her."

I learned it in my own body. I have never been able to unlearn it.

Then came the year 1850, and the Congress of the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Understand what that law did. It did not merely permit slavery in the South — it conscripted the North. It commanded free men in free states to hunt the desperate and hand them back into bondage. My own sister-in-law wrote to me: "if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is."

And I answered her, and I said: "I feel now that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."

So I wrote what I saw. And when men asked me how I dared, I told them: "I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation." Now they tell me, madam, do not agitate. Do not disturb the Union.

And do not imagine the guilt is Southern only. I made Simon Legree a New England man on purpose. "The people of the free States have defended, encouraged, and participated; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South." Northern mills spun the cotton. Northern banks financed the crop. Northern churches kept their silence. We are all stained.

So what can one person do? I will tell you what I have told every reader who ever asked me. "There is one thing that every individual can do — they can see to it that they feel right."

But feeling is only the beginning, for pity is cheap and costs nothing. Having felt, you must act — refuse the law, shelter the fugitive, vote as if the Judgment were watching. Because it is. "A day of grace is yet held out to us."

There is no compromise with this evil. There is no gentle fifty-year descent from a sin like this. There is only the day you decide, and the day you do not.

Let it be buried. — and let no generation after ours ever be asked to defend it.

AI DISCLOSURE: I used AI for this assignment. I did my research on Harriet Beecher Stowe and put some of my research notes into AI. I asked AI to form a script talking as if I were Harriet Beecher Stowe about her life and how she is an abolitionist.

Mock Trial Presentations

Mock Trial About John Mann and State V. Mann.

Last week during class we did a mock trial and stepped into the presence of a courtroom. The case we were tackling was State V. Mann, a real case that came before the Supreme Court of North Carolina in the 1830s. This forced the class to sit down and listen to the case thoroughly to form our own opinions.

The Facts of the Case

The case centers on John Mann, a white slaveowner, and a woman named Lydia, whom he held in bondage. According to the facts we worked from, Lydia had grown desperate enough to try to run from Mann. In response, he shot her in the back. She survived, and Mann was charged with assault, but the punishment handed down was startlingly light: a fine of just five dollars.

Mann didn't accept even that modest penalty. He appealed the ruling, arguing that the fine itself was unjust and that the state had no business punishing him at all for how he treated a person he legally "owned."

The State's Argument

Prosecuting the case, the state leaned heavily on the cultural and religious climate of the 1830s. Their argument wasn't just legal — it was moral. They pointed to the era as a time of genuine moral awakening, when religion played an outsized role in shaping how people understood right and wrong. That spiritual energy, they argued, was the very fuel behind the growing abolitionist movement. Churches and town hall meetings became spaces for self-reflection and moral courage, places where people started to publicly reckon with the ethics of slavery. On top of the moral case, the state also made a practical one: slavery, they argued, was dragging down the broader economy, holding back real development.

The Defense's Argument

Mann's lawyers took the opposite approach, and it's the part of the case that's hardest to read. Their defense rested on the legal classification of enslaved people as property, plain and simple. If Lydia was property under the law, they argued, then she couldn't be harmed the way a person could — property, they claimed, doesn't feel pain, and property doesn't hold human rights. Under that logic, Mann wasn't answerable for how he disciplined something he owned.

Why This Case Still Matters

Sitting through this mock trial made clear just how much the law of that era was shaped — and warped — by treating human beings as objects. The prosecution's case shows a society in the middle of a moral reckoning, with religion and public discourse pushing people toward abolition. The defense's case shows exactly what that reckoning was up against: a legal system built on the premise that enslaved people had no standing as people at all.

Running this as a mock trial rather than just reading about it in a textbook made the stakes feel real in a way that reading alone doesn't always achieve. Arguing both sides — even the ones you find morally repugnant — is uncomfortable, but that discomfort is exactly the point. It's a reminder of how recently our legal system enshrined ideas we now recognize as indefensible, and how much of that change came from ordinary people insisting things had to be different.

AI DISCLOSURE: I took notes from the mock trial presentations during class. Then I used Claude AI and put pictures of my notes into AI and asked it to form my notes into a blogpost form. I was the one that verified and added in the links throughout the blogpost.