Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s and Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, are very different pieces of literature. They are each set about 20 years apart, as one covers the coming of age for African American men and women, and the other explains the difficulty Truman faced when choosing whether to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The question is, what is the necessity in all of this? What is the point? Why go through all of the trouble to prove the importance of African American culture or dropping the bombs on Japan in order to end the war? The point is, America wouldn’t be where it is today without the issues discussed in both of these books.
In Erin Chapman’s Prove It on Me, she discusses how the African American culture immersed in the 1920s, through a myriad of art forms and music. Though there was an expansion of the African American culture as a whole, Chapman’s book focused mainly on the growth of African American women and how they made their mark on society in the 1920s. Blueswoman, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, was one of the first black women of this era to defy the social norms of gender, sexuality, and racial solidarity (Chapman 3). The breakthrough of African American women in a very white society grew to be momentous. Women became marvels as they danced and sang; men looked at them as though they were exotic creatures. Rainey brought her music to life in a way that was so influential to other African American women, that they changed the way everyone was viewing the African American society. A quote from Prove It on Me states:
Her song dares the listener’s condemnation, invites and then dismisses disapproval, and in doing so evinces a modern individuality and commitment to self-determination. The blueswoman both admits and denies any culpability-the lyrics of her song relate that she engages in genderbending acts subversive t...