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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. By what decade had advertising of products taken on the second goal of denigrating African Americans?

2. What was the surname of the first African American to ever earn a PhD?

3. Gates asserts that the pamphlet entitled "Miscegenation" (137) had been a work of what?

4. In what year was the Separate Car Act passed by the Louisiana legislature?

5. Gates expresses shock at whose endorsement of "restrictions on the right to vote among the black poor" (201)?

Short Essay Questions

1. Explain the concept of the Talented Tenth advocated by W.E.B. Du Bois.

2. What did Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Joseph McKenna write about African Americans in a majority opinion report in 1898?

3. How many people are estimated to have been part of the Talented Tenth in 1920?

4. What percentage of African Americans lived in the South by 1900?

5. What was the intended goal of the group who launched the New Negro movement?

6. Name at least five qualities of an ideal member of the New Negro movement, according to the perspective of its members?

7. What examples does Gates provide for his claim that the "postwar American collective unconscious" was for a time "projected onto a host of everyday, ordinary consumer objects" (132)?

8. How does Barbara Johnson define a stereotype and why does Gates consider her definition useful?

9. Which gains in the area of racial equality made during Reconstruction had been lost by the arrival of the twentieth century?

10. Which aspect of W.E.B. Du Bois's ideas about race does Gates find problematic?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is Gates, Jr.'s message regarding the difference between awareness and activism and how does Gates, Jr. get this message across to the reader?

Essay Topic 2

Discuss Gates, Jr.’s use of Aristotle's appeals within the text of Stony the Road. How does Gates, Jr. use each of the three appeals to persuade the reader of argumentative points central to the tenets of the work?

Essay Topic 3

In what way does Gates, Jr. go about breaking the text into parts and how do these structural elements help to advance the text’s arguments?

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