Lawrence Wu (Fong)

Riding the rails from coast to coast, he learned things about himself and the world.

With a certain amount of pride, he called himself a hobo, bouncing from city to city, seeking his fortune.

Fong spent the Great Depression in San Francisco's Chinatown.

He experienced the era at the street level and the everyday minutia of economic struggle.

Henry, Meridel, Fong, and Dorothy's stories, captured in oral histories, diaries, and essays, give us a window into what it was like to live through this time, a moment that often gets reduced to one archetype of American suffering.

Their stories, their voices, are the ones we don't generally hear.

Dorothy Height was living in Harlem, New York at this time.

She was a college student, and she knew she was lucky.

She had food to eat, a roof over her head.

So she wanted to find a way to do something to help where she could.

Dorothy had also seen the Depression destroy her hometown.

But it was in Harlem that she saw how resilient people could be in the face of utter desperation.