Community Stories

An Account of Experience with Discrimination
By: Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth was apart of a group of anti slavery women volunteering with ex-slave refugees in D.C. during the Civil War.  She often experienced discrimination on public transportation even after slavery was abolished.  Her idea of "the old slaveholding spirit" is about how slavery was abolished and yet the community's view on African Americans was still the same.  How she says: "but it must die" means that people must accept blacks eventually because of the movement for colored people.  They simply would not take being discriminated against any longer.

I feel like a primary document such as a letter like this one has a greater meaning and effect on the reader than a reporter's story because the words cames directly from the person's mouth and weren't just interpreted by a second person.  I believe that primary documents have greater weight and credibility than reports and have a deeper impact on the person who them because they can really be moved by it and can connect with it.  Letters such as this one can give you a detailed and more specific perspective on a community because the person who wrote it actually lived through it.

To be Young Black and Gifted

When growing up, Hansberry felt that it was unfair to be living on the south side of Chicago because it was so dirty and poor.  Her family cared about her, but weren't very loving at all.  She had to grow up without a Dad because he passed away when she was young.  She says the first time her sister embraced her was at her father's funeral.  The ideals and attitudes that her parents instilled in their children were:"we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone; that we were the products of the proudest and most mistreated of the races of man; that there was nothing enormously difficult about life; that no one succeeded as a matter of course."  This worried her mother so much that she was forced to patrol their house at night with a gun while her Dad was in D.C. fighting for black rights with the NAACP.

Because Hansberry was the youngest in her family, her siblings treated her as a nuisance so eventually she learned to play alone.  At the end, in the letter, she mentions how when her and her family moved into a white neighborhood, they were harassed, spat at, cursed at, and almost killed.

University Days

Thurber was a popular humorist writer for the New Yorker.  He had very bad vision his whole life and eventually went blind.  The classes that he took in college didn't live up to his expectations because he found them all to be pointless and he took no interest in them.  For example, when he took gymnasium, he hated it so much because they wouldn't let him wear his glasses so he would run into things.  For the swimming portion of it, he even had another student show up and do it in his place.

On way that he could not live up to the University's expectations was that he didn't pass a few classes.  He had to take botany twice because he couldn't see the cells under the microscope due to his vision impairment. He also had to retake military drill twice because he wasn't a good soldier at all.  These expectation formed his experiences because it showed him things that he did and did not like so it helped him eventually choose his path of journalism.

I Left My Heart In San Francisco 
By: Tony Bennett
The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay
The glory that was Rome is of another day
I've been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan
I'm going home to my city by the Bay

I left my heart in San Francisco
High on a hill, it calls to me
To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars
The morning fog may chill the air, I don't care

My love waits there in San Francisco
Above the blue and windy sea
When I come home to you, San Francisco
Your golden sun will shine for me 


This classic song is about a man missing his hometown.  He's traveled to all these different, magnificent places and yet none of them can live up to San Francisco.  In all of these other cities he feels a piece of him missing because it isn't like San Francisco.  He loves every single aspect of his city, even the unfavorable things.  Upon his travels, he has missed: the hills, cable cars, fog, and the bay.  All of these things are specific characteristics of San Francisco that you can find no where else in the world all collectively in one place.  He identifies San Francisco in this song as his own little piece of heaven and loves it more than any other place on the face of planet earth.  He takes a lot of pride in it cannot wait to be back there.