Praying For Bread And Roses Analysis

In the novels, Praying for Sheetrock and Bread and Roses, both authors tell a story about how a group of people struggled in their lives. Both novels are based off of true stories with small portions of fiction in order to give the stories more depth. In Praying for Sheetrock, by Melissa Greene, the reader is placed in a small county on Georgia called McIntosh during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The overall theme of Praying for Sheetrock is based on African Americans fighting for a better way of life equal to their, more powerful, white neighbors. As for Bread and Roses, by Bruce Watson, this novels overall theme sets the reader in Lawrence Massachusetts where workers fight for a better way of life in the labor setting. Each novels theme can be analyzed, compared, and discussed in order to further understand the connections between them. Praying for Sheetrock puts the reader in a third person perspective of the events that slowly unfold between the lives of African Americans and whites. The novel can be broken down into three basic categories of analysis, economic inequality, racism, and civil rights. All of the categories can be linked back to the same man Tom Poppell in one way or another. Tom Poppell was the sheriff of McIntosh County and can be considered a noble in a sense. This idea extends to the African American population as they are considered serfs. This comparison is made because the sheriff has a lot of power over the county. He is able to make up rule and his deputies enforce them with very little questions asked. As for the serf African Americans, they are significantly poor. This is highlighted in the title “Praying for Sheetrock” as their homes are more like shacks and thusly they pray for their house to be better. This position is further confirmed because transport trucks sometimes break down in the county and the sheriff allows the African Americans to scavenge for scraps. Later this problem was slightly resolved by a man named Ed Finch who attacked the situation through the Justice system. After Finch was injured from a gunshot wound to the mouth he was then dragged in to a jail cell and denied further medical attention by the officer holding him. He was charged with aggravated assault, drunk and disorderly conduct, and obstruction of justice (Greene 121). All of this happened with the sheriff not being touched by any form of misuse of force or any other complaint. This twisted reality of misuse of power over another was settled when brought in front of City Hall. Finch won the battle against the police and overturned the caste system that the public was living in. After this form of economic inequality was corrected, even though it took a brutal event for this to occur, the fight was not over. A man by the name of Thurnell Alston, who has been a common person throughout the book, decided to run for county commissioner, and his first plan of action he was going to attack was that of the board of education. The schools were segregated in a way that majority of the white children went to one school, with the exception of a few poorer white kids who could not afford it, and the African American children went to another school. The board of education was based off of racism, but was never confirmed this way by the board itself. The all white private school was believed, but denied by the board of education, to offer special funding to the school and even chances of …show more content…
I enjoyed reading Bread and Roses because I never really got to get a first person account on how the labor unions worked. My only reference to the labor unions were what I had read in a textbook. The book gave me a more broad understanding on how the people had to deal with their lives and how they grew to a better one. For Praying for Sheetrock it is always inspiring to hear how the African American people rose up and challenged the status quo. With these ideas the new read on the accounts in Bread and Roses led me to liking the novel more since it was the first time I have read something like