The civil rights era was a time period of wanting and fighting for change and equal rights for whites and blacks to live together as one. There were things that still separated them including segregation, black laws, and white people being uncomfortable living together with African Americans after slavery has ended. In Black Boy by Richard Wright, and A Lesson Before Dying by Erness J. Gaines, these books show the differences and similarities the narrators a black boy and a black educated man go through and how they were treated in the 1912’s-1950’s while being males of color, living in the south. Richard the narrator of Black Boy and Grant the narrator of A Lesson Before Dying go through many points of their lives experiencing moments of …show more content…
Not just them being physically alike with their dark skin and being both males, they are also dealing with boredom, hate and racism on the daily. Grant and Richard and both educated, don't enjoy their home lives, and want to move towns. Living in the south as a black person isn't the best during this time period having to deal with racism and being told things you know aren’t true just because of their skin color. Richard is just trying his best to educate himself so he can be a writer but people put things in his head saying stuff like “You’ll never be a writer, who dares put those ideas in your head.” (Wright 147) Richard luckily did not listen to those words and knows he can be what he wants and not to listen to people who just want him to fail. Grant experiences racism when he goes to Henri's house for the first time and enters through the back door with his Aunts. (Gaines 18) This is showing racism through taught acts by black people from white people. Since Grant knows he's not welcomed through the front door as a black …show more content…
(Wright 22-23) After learning to read and his mom being proud and encouraging him, Richard goes off to school to educate himself even more. Richard also lives with his mom and brother in Mississippi, then with his grandma too in Jackson, Mississippi, and eventually getting all the way to his Aunt's house in Arkansas. (Wright 36/46) All this moving around as a young child made Richard a bit troubled in his childhood and often not knowing how to deal with his emotions in life. Richard doesnt have a father figure to look up to in his life since his dad left him, his mom, and brother. (Wright 15) Richard is also seen as not worthy by his father because he's just a boy, with his dad telling him things like “Get out of my eyes before I smack you down”. (Wright 12) Also seen as not worthy by white people since he's black. This resulted in Richard being used by white people for entertainment in bars with Richard saying “I took a sip and coughed, the men and women laughed. The entire crowd in the saloon gathered about me.” (Wright 20) He was young and didn’t know better and he loved the attention because he lacked it at home. Richards was just a boy, struggling to find himself, and learn to deal with his
Richard Wrights memoir Black Boy teaches it's readers about how living in the America was set up.most importantly it teaches how badly black people were treated. Wright was mistreated just because he was a young black boy living in the south. In the memoir Black Boy Richard was trying to tell his reader how bad racism was back when he was a kid. Back in the 1900's Wright also used pathos to show how his emotions were toward racism.
The first half of the book is set in the rural South, where Wright experiences extreme poverty, racism, and violence. Wright is consistently abused, both by his family and his peers outside of his household. Even after his terrible beginnings, life doesn’t get much better, and he sees multiple people being abused and harassed by the harsh racism in the south. Things only get worse for Richard after he is forced to fight his friend because of white men. Richard ends up saving himself by obtaining a library card, which he can use to seek out knowledge to move to the north with.
Just to show how separate these two stories are, Black Boy opens up with young Richard lighting straw on fire in his grandmother’s furnace while his brother repeatedly tells him to stop. Richard then sets his grandmother’s curtains ablaze just to understand what would happen. This event is a representation of Richard’s constant struggle to understand the separation between black and white and the way the world works now while at the same time being constantly badgered about how he should stop trying to understand everything and should just go along with everything. Because of Richard’s constant desire to understand everything, he repeatedly creates turmoil in his numerous households. An example being when he moves back into his grandmother’s house and takes up an extreme obsession with reading while his heavily religious grandmother, who believes that anything fictional is the work of the devil.
Richard went through a lot of discrimination and bullying throughout his life. However, this didn’t stop him from reaching his Rock and Roll excellency. He would play a show and get heckled off of the stage by racist white people. After a show, he would be insulted by the venue owner and not be fully paid. Also, his record label ripped him off.
Richard was faced with challenges when it came to his job in the life saving service. He had a promotion but people did not think he was “qualified”. “The white surfmen on Etheridge’s team quit in protest. And his Life-Saving service station was burned the to the ground by a group who thought a black man should not hold such a high position. ”Tucker was too young and too short to join the life saving service or the
Richard Wright was born after the Civil War but before the Civil Rights Movement. If Wright were writing an autobiography titled “Black Boy”, today in 2017, about a black boy growing up in the United States, he would write about white people horribly expressing racism against African Americans, the brutality police officers perform on blacks, and the positively protesting movement, Black Lives Matter, which people engage in fighting for the rights of African Americans. During the time period of “Black Boy”, whites were awfully expressing racism towards African Americans. They would discriminate, despise, and violently mistreat them. If Richard Wright would be writing an autobiography about the life of a black boy today in 2017, he would write
He is often frustrated that he cannot do more to fight back against the cruelty of white southern society. However, since he maintains his confidence, Richard’s perspective is markedly different from the roles that both Black
This sparked a major change in America's system, but the belittling and dehumanizing of the blacks remained constant and got worse for a period of time. For example, they were used as slaves and entertainment, without being afforded basic human rights. Throughout the book, Richard experiences mental, emotional, and physical dehumanization. Richard experiences emotional dehumanization by one of his uncles when his grandfather passed away. Richard had to inform Uncle Tom and accidentally threw the information at him rapidly.
They often argued with him and put him down. Shockingly rich wright was not the best reader or writer and his until just so happened to be his school teacher and was able to make it more different for him because of his ante wrong doing he says that this is how his whole family treats him which causes him to fell like an outsider in his own home everyone and while his family was settle to him but this did not deceive Richard. “ the entire family became kind and change and it drove me an even greater emotional mister from them ( wright pg, 113) In result wright hungers for a much better life in the future. Sadly wright is never able to suit his need for acceptance form people his age.
The father is described as having “direct, animalistic impulses” (Wright 51), that “Joy was as unknown to him as was despair” (Wright 51). These descriptions characterize Richard’s father as having little emotion, which is implied to have been a result of the way he was treated by his landowners, shown by Wright stating “From the white landowners above him there had not been handed to him a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition”. To Richard, his father has been altered by the society around him, conditioned to work for those above him without issue. Characterization allows the reader to understand the personality of Richard’s father without ever meeting him, without ever using
Richard quickly grows up and is mature enough to ask questions about his race, which is clear when Wright says, “My grandmother, who was as white as any white person, had never looked white to me” (23). RIchard is starting to ask himself an important question: What does it mean to be white? He wonders why his grandmother is black instead of white, which commences his wonderings about what the roots of racism really are. RIchard begins to curiously ask more and more questions, showcasing his curiosity and need for answers, when he says, “Granny looks white.. Then why is she living with us coloured folks...did granny become coloured when she married grandpa?”
So it is due to hunger, hardship and scarcity that he is introduced to the harsh actualities of bigotry. On occasion, things deteriorated that Richard and his family had nothing to consume in view of the extraordinary level of poverty. In order to save themselves from the conditions
Richard has always felt the unjust of race, and has felt how segregation made it hard for him to have a future. But when he gets a chance to get revenge on the whites, he refuses when he thinks ”Who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to walk and act like a man.(200)” Stealing went against his morals of the right way to succeed and would not help the community appearance to the whites. The community as a whole is very religous but Richard does not share these beliefs, even with the persistence of his friends and family he says ”Mama, I don't feel a thing.(155)” This caused his friends to beg him, but in face of rejection they leave him alone.
“I was learning rapidly how to watch white people, to observe their every move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what we said and what we left unsaid” (Wright 181). Richard uses his observation of whites to guide himself on how to act and react around white people. For example he must agree with the whites even if he truly disagrees. For example he must agree with the whites even if he truly disagrees. “I answered with false heartiness, falling quickly into that nigger-being-a-good-natured-boy-in-the- presence-of-a-white-man pattern, a pattern into which I could now slide easily” (Wright 234).
The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).