100 years later
The Plaza hotel was an iconic destination where only the elites attended, and by elites I mean the white men which was abstractly equivalent to the word privileged, because they were granted all the luxuries. A person of color or even a woman could not have casually sat down at The Palm Court in The Plaza Hotel to have afternoon tea if they wanted, so I chose the The Plaza hotel as the center of my project because it was the very symbol of the thing we could not have had. However, the Roaring 20’s was the beginning of an era, the beginning of a revolution in which society debated over and challenged issues such as foreign immigration, evolution of the American society, the Ku Klux Klan, women’s roles, and race which created a ripple effect spanning through the rest of the decades, and some even today. To start off this ripple effect, Women didn’t have the right to vote, were considered inadequate to have an education unlike that of their counterpart- men, they were given unfair wages for their work on jobs, had no right to vote, had no part in leadership, but women had a new found sense of equality and economic independence after working on the homefront during World War I resulting in them campaigning and fighting for women’s suffrage and were granted it through the addition of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Additionally, after World War 1, African Americans were undaunted to put themselves in a position for democracy and topple the system of segregation, lynching and discrimination. This very concept created the Harlem Renaissance, an explosion of black culture that included literature which narrates being black in a white culture and artistic developments such as Jazz. The Harlem Renaissance set a precedent that left the future generations fighting for democracy through civil disobedience led by Martin Luther King, Jr and the black power movement by Malcolm X. It is evident that many barriers kept people of color from equal opportunities but that didn’t stop us in our race for impartiality because we fought, campaigned, made sacrifices, felt victory, fell on the face, but got back up. Eventually the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, which ended segregation in public places and banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. A 100 years later from the time of the Roaring 20’s; the individual in the photographs is Kristie Lyn Ranchurejee, a WOMAN, a PERSON OF COLOR that went to college, has the occupation of a lawyer (once a job considered fitting only for men), has a credit card in her name and unmarried(once only could have gotten one in her husband’s name) and could sit at the Plaza Hotel’s Palm Court to casually have afternoon tea. This achievement spread beyond the walls of the plaza, in the other photographs you can see people are integrated and are together. At the end of the day, I’d like to think that The United States of America achieved the notion that was delivered by Abraham Lincoln “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
ABout the artist
Kevin Roodnauth is currently a high school junior at John Adams High School. He was born in Guyana but now lives in Queens, New York City. Continuously taking shots mainly of architectural and nature settings made him realize his passion for photography. At first the only equipment accessible to him for photography was his iPhone, until the Future Imagemakers program which gave him access to a DSLR camera, in turn increasing his knowledge about this art form.