The Return to Paris: Melvin Lowe in Lamar County, Texas (1894 - 1920)

Calluses were all that Melvin Lowe knew. He was in the same boat as most of the laborers in East Texas at the turn of the century. His family was not from the upper class, and racially they didn't conform to society's expectations.

As a matriculating child, he was denied a chance to attain a proper education, and had to augment his family's earnings by going to work before he was ten-years-old. As the oldest, he had to work so that his siblings could go to school.

Tensions riled his family af...