Interestingly, though this reading was by far the shortest of the four assigned, it stuck out to me as the most powerful and meaningful, even with the shortest amount of words. Within this short story, capturing one moment, one event, in the author's life, there are several claims of meaning, of value, and of hope within it. John Hope Franklin describes how he, as a young boy, and his mother boarded this train that coincidentally, was traveling between two towns in our very state of Oklahoma, Rentiesville and Checotah. I've read and heard about some of the racial issues in Oklahoma before - the race riots in 1921 Tulsa are, unfortunately, a part of national history (Tulsa), but reading something like this, connected so closely geographically,
