Charles S. Johnson

This is from an essay to a symposium at Howard University in 1954 titled, "The Negro Renaissance and Its Significance."

"This period was the comet's tail of success of a great period of cultural ferment in the nation, the 'melting pot' era, a period of the ascendancy of unbridled free enterprise, of the open beginnings of class struggle and new and feeble mutterings of self-conscious labor; of muckrakers and social settlements, of the open and unabashed acceptance of 'inferior and superior races and civilization.'"

I like this sentence. It's long and unwieldy, but it works. I'm a prodigious highlighter, but I rarely underline such a large block of text. This, however, perfectly encapsulated a vast and complex viewpoint, and in doing so, was really quite succinct. I like the capitalization of "Its" in the title because even though it's not the contraction, my first instinct was to lowercase, when of course it shouldn't be.

I think the strong verb style is what stands out the most to me. Also some of the word choices are just so striking, "feeble mutterings of self-conscious labor", "comet's tail of success", "unbridled free enterprise", just fantastic examples of vivid, active writing. I think "unabashed acceptance", plays on some sort of buried alliteration that we've read about, but I don't quite grasp...

My imitation - This period was the summit of an arduous journey, a "coming together", a time of rampant capitalist swelling, and a collective awakening of the classes to the struggle, of establishing communities, and of questioning long-held beliefs on race. - Yeah, well, it's not my style.