The economic situation for my family in Mississippi has truly affected my view on education. My family’s situation was extremely tough and economic prosperity was almost non-existent. My grandmother grew up in a poor sharecropper family who worked hard in return for very little. As my grandmother once told me, “The only thing I wanted for my children and grandchildren was for them to have the opportunity to have a good life and not break their backs for other people to profit” (Dorothy Thomas). This quote shows how in Mississippi no matter how hard my grandmother worked there would never be any economic opportunity for her descendants. It also showed that she knew what she wanted for our family and would do anything to make that happen. My grandmother was not looking for her decision to leave Mississippi to be temporary but instead it was a permanent change for the family. My grandmother understood that moving would change our family’s life because it allowed economic prosperity. In the South, whites denied thousands of blacks the opportunity to own companies and buy property. Denying blacks these rights allowed whites to control them economically. At that time there was no way for blacks to have economic freedom and ignore physical attacks. “In the last decades of the nineteenth century, lynching of Black people in the Southern States became an institutionalized method used for whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy.”(Robert A. Gibson)The economic struggle that my grandmother faced in Mississippi was something like what Ida Mae Brandon Gladney faced in The Warmth of Other Suns because they both Ida and my grandmother and struggled economically and left for better opportunities. My grandmother’s strength to find economic relief has taught me to go after what I want in life. There is nothing I cannot do in life; my grandmother leaving Mississippi has taught me that.
