experience of Clarence Lee on the railroads

experience of Clarence Lee on the railroads

Life in the South and chiefly Louisiana was facing a hard economic time for everyone, but the sharecroppers faced more challenges in meeting the basic needs. Clarence Lee is the author who was a son of a sharecropper in debt, and he had to be sent away to fend for himself. The author is an African American who had nothing in a society that was discriminative in terms of racism. Thus he never occupied any respectful position but only a beggar who was out to survive. The author documented his experiences in Louisiana railroads using a memoir of how he had to struggle and the challenges he faced while out of the care of his parents who were sold and bought from one farm to another. The source is a memoir because it provides the experience of Clarence Lee on the railroads and how he used to suffer and get depressed because of the constant racism he faced daily.

The publication of this memoir in 1999 meant that most scholars, students, and historians could have access to the memoir. To find the history of slavery abolition and the renaissance period could have lead many academic scholars to find the publication to interpret the challenges the African Americans faced on the railroads. In the hope of researching experiences, many scholars may have accessed the publication to learn “more analysis into the racial and gender aspects of transient life” using from Clarence memoir. This provides the experience of race and gender and how it influenced the survival of African Americans in traveling on the railroads. The author’s thesis is that after the abolition of slavery in the South, the African American was homeless, hungry and uneducated which made it hard to fully meet the basic human needs which drove them back to slavery through railroads and sharecropping. The purpose of the author was to depict how the life of African American boys was after the abolition of slavery and the racial struggles and challenges they faced as they went out to establish their individual lives away from their parents.

The historical context of this writing was established in a time where the Southerners were facing great economic times, and many people, especially ex-slaves, had to move to find work and food. According to Marrs, “.From the 1850s to 1860s, southerners began committing more money to railroads, and an explosion of mileage resulted” (p. 5-6). This shows that Clarence Lee was traveling during this time when the railroads were receiving massive popularity as a means of transport to the north, where the economy was doing great. During this time, the southerners, even whites, were facing hard economic times, and they were far behind in technological innovations and still relied on the cotton fields. After the abolition of slavery, there was no free labor, and thus the South faced a crisis in the economy. Many of the people, and especially African Americans, were moving to the north where racism was not prevalent.

The memoir showed biasness when it came to the depiction of how whiteiscriminated against African Americans. He says that they had never seen a dollar, and neither did he know that it had a face, but he goes says that one had to work for a whole day just for one dollar (Lee 132). This shows biasness in telling the real situation he faced and exaggerated some of the events that were happening in Louisiana at that particular period. The fact that he agrees that one was paid one dollar means that he knew what it looked like, thus creating biasness in telling the life on the railroads.

The intended audience that this document is for the student, the African American community, historians, an d all people around the globe who would with to grasp what was happening on the railroads after the abolition of slavery. The document provides a personal experience of Lee, who was at the center of economic instability in the South. The memoirs provide critical information about how slavery impacted the South and how racism was still a problem to success after slavery was outlawed. However the document does not offer complete experience and the activities that were going on during this particular time because it does not shed light on how the workers were able to survive with one dollar in the middle of an economic disaster. The document also clearly fails to offer insight into the challenges of black women who were traveling on the railroads looking for work or escaping the harsh economic times in the South. The source introduces us to the experiences of slavery and how the southerners white believed that slavery should never be abolished. It introduces information about the civil war that ensued between the north and the South. The war-affected many blacks in the South, and according to “Mob violence against black transgressors, not unknown in the antebellum era, proliferated after Lincoln’s election and especially after the outbreak of the war” (Ash 13). This explains the situation that had to lead the author on the railroads and why people were traveling back and forth. The memoir shows how the abolition of slavery affected the South and especially how it gave disguised freedom to the blacks who were facing more challenges even after being liberated from their masters.

This source is essential in understanding the history of African Americans and how slavery affected their past and thus defining who they are in the modern world. The source offers the zeal of many black’s quest to succeed and become essential figures in society through hard work and education. It provides information about what was on the mind of young black men at this period and what they did to overcome the challenges they faced due to their skin color. The current values that we hold in the modern world may extensively differ with what the author holds in the document because, according to Lee, he thought that even without education and use of commonsense, he would succeed. However, the value of education may lead us to interpret the text as sentiments or ideas of a person who did not understand what was going on and was just consumed on illusions and assumptions. Contemporaries might identify more with the author than a student or a person living in a democratic society would. Case in point, a teenager in the modern, would not be able to grasped or imagine an incident where a person is lynched for committing a crime.

Riding the Rails during the Great Depression by Clarence Lee offers an insight into the existing racial profiling of African Americans who have to contend with police brutality because of their skin color. The memoir is significant because it shows how racism has been used to sideline blacks for centuries and then blame them for their challenges. This source provides thorough information about the lives of blacks and the problems they experienced when it came to finding sustainable economic activities to support their lives and those of their families.