Community Stories

An Account of Experience with Discrimination

                “It is hard for the old slaveholding spirit to die” means that even though slavery was abolished, people still believe in the ideas of that time. This goes with the idea that a community shapes your beliefs because it shows that those who grew up around slavery and around segregation, were influenced by their community to believe that this was the right way.

                Primary documents such as letters or journals differ than a reporter or short story because the primary document give a firsthand perspective on the community being that the person actually is a part of the community and have also experienced what it is like to be a part of that community.

University Days

                A way university classes didn’t live up to his expectations were that he never really was able to fit in with his teachers and wasn’t able to fully ‘see’ things as clearly as others.  An example of this was in his botany class where he couldn’t see the flower cells like everyone else could. This class didn’t live up to his expectations because he believed that he would be able to get the full experience out of it. He didn’t live up to his teachers expectations because he wasn’t as   ‘good’ as everyone else. For example when he was in his drilling camp, he didn’t live up to the expectations of his General because he had to always retake the class unlike everyone else. I think these expectations formed his experiences in the community because by him going into college with certain expectations of how his experiences would be, and by it not ending up how he though, shaped him and made him stronger. In the last sentence when speaking about his experiences with his General he says “I don’t think about it much anymore” meaning that he has moved past his bad experiences which made him stronger.