In the 1974 novel, Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow, there was an incident that included the death of an African American woman that I feel showed a perfect example of the discrimination and prejudice majority of white Americans had at that time regarding African Americans. One of the characters, Sarah, is an African American woman who was wanting to speak to the president to plead her fiancé’s case to him. Coalhouse Walker, her fiancé, was driving the route he typically did but, on this drive, the firemen demand he pay some sort of toll. Because this is the first occurrence of this, he refuses, and the firemen destroy his car. He has talked to several attorneys to take his case but because he is African American, they refuse. Sarah was naïve and wanted to take matters into her own hands, so she went to the event where he was speaking and yells “Mr. President! President!”. With her black hand in the air, one of the militiamen was convinced her empty hand contained a shiny weapon and he took the butt of his gun and bashed into her sternum as hard as he could. After this, she was brought to the police station, not a hospital. Despite her coughing up blood through the night, they wait until morning to take her to a hospital where her sternum and several ribs were cracked, and she developed pneumonia by the following day. Though her actions and intentions were both completely harmless, her initial charge was attempted assassination that later was reduced to disturbing the peace. Within the next few days, Sarah passed.

This novel is written with fictional characters woven in with real historical figures and into some real events. This certain event is based on a true historical event, the attempted assassination of Theodore Roosevelt. In the novel, Roosevelt was speaking in New Rochelle, New York and a week prior had been in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he was shot in the breast pocket, but survived thanks to the spectacle case and folded up 50 page speech. In New Rochelle, the Vice-President was out, but Sarah was unable to tell the difference. She yelled for the president with a hand in the air and out of fear from the attempted assassination the week prior, the militiamen practically beat her to the point where she was coughing up blood. This woman was beaten and later died from these injuries simply because she was an African American yelling for the president that was not there. The troubling aspects of this death is first, she was brought to a police station, not a hospital even though she was coughing up blood. She was still facing charges despite having no weapon and her only mistake was yelling “President! President!”. The biggest issue I struggle with is that the person who attempted to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt was white male. Sarah was a black female, meaning there were no similarities that they based her calling for Roosevelt to relate to the attempt in Wisconsin. The reason for beating her was not because she was similar to the last incident, but simply because she was African American. The color of her skin got her killed. Doctorow wrote about her death like this to bring light to these types of issues with discrimination and prejudice. This woman had done nothing wrong and had no true signs of intent for anything bad, but was beaten and kept from immediate hospitalization that could have saved her. This pays perfect homage to the injustice that faced African Americans then and now.

Doctorow, E. L., Ragtime, New York City, New York: Random House, 1975.

This is my historical source.

Stan Gores. “The Attempted Assassination of Teddy Roosevelt.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, vol. 53, no. 4, 1970, pp. 269–277. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4634551. Accessed 21 Jan. 2021.

This shed more light on the Roosevelt attempted assassination, the true event that the issue I focus on is related to.