Journal 10. Kayla Frea.

Journal 10 

My active reading is going very well. I think I am getting better at remembering and having information to write down in the margin. This book is easier for me to pick out history and different subjects. I am also getting better at nut shelling for the end of the stories. The strengths I see in the book is the different styles he chooses to tell his stories in. It flows very well. He is also good at grouping the stories together and all the stories lead their themes right into the next one sometimes. The weakness of the book I would say the portraits, I wish the photographer had taken more photos that were not posed. He could have really shown the emotion in the stories to the reader both through the photos and the writing. They used the photos just to put an image of the subject for the reader. They could have told a story with the photos and the words. 

Geneva Tisdale, she was a cook at the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter. She has been a cook there since the sit-in during the Civil Rights Movement. I learned about her influence in the movement such as her being one of the first African Americans to eat at the counter, “So we done that, and sure enough it wasn’t long before the photographers and people started crowding in—and they didn’t know it was us!”(Isay 53). I think it is a great thing that she can say she was one of the first to be served at the counter. I want to know if she ever did get to eat at that counter again. Harold C. Cotton, he was a hat blocker. He loved what he did and he would keep all his customers in the same room no matter what the skin color was. He would also keep all of his customers hats no matter what or how long that they had been at his shop. They would stay there until they were picked up by the owner.

They were both very similar in the writing style, both being written as the person being interviewed was telling the story. They were both took place in the same city. They both had themes of African Americans being served the same way as anyone else. They both showed how they moved up in their ranks in their workplaces. Both of these story’s tellers were in their place of work for a long time, most of their individual lives. The differences in the writing is they both started at different places in time. They also tell different stories and they are effected by the Civil Rights Movement in different ways. Segregation effected them in different ways. 

When I was doing my research I found one website that Geneva Tisdale was not even cited in being one of the first ones that got served, but it did say employees were the first ones to eat at the counter. (https://www.sitinmovement.org/history/greensboro-chronology.asp). They did tell about one of the employees that she did reference was in the website, but with another last name so I do not know for sure if it was her.  I also tried to look up Bob’s Hat Shop and could not find any information on it except for an audio of this story that we read.