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Wilson's strategy of writing a play for each decade of the twentieth century focuses attention on the long journey with little progress and change, one that so many African Americans have taken. In order to examine a present in which African American characters struggle within the socio-economic climate of the twentieth century, Wilson revisits the past. Wilson believes that "you should start making connections to your parents and to your grandparents and [start] working backwards." In Two Trains Running, Wilson revisits the Great Migration, the exodus of African Americans from the South to the North in search of the promised land, and dramatizes the consequences of this shift in population in the lives of Memphis Lee and the patrons of his restaurant in the late 1960s. Memphis owns and manages a restaurant that soon will become a casualty of the city's renovation plans. During the course of the play several characters(Holloway, Sterling, Lisa, Hambone, West, Wolf, etc.) discover the importance of perseverance, despite past hardships and injustices that plague their present lives. Wilson recalls his '60s and suggests they return to the past.