Native Son
by Richard Wright
• Born in 1908 (Mississippi)
• Grew up on same plantation that his grandparents had worked
on as chattel
• Abandoned by illiterate father
• Mother was in ill health
• Separated from brother and spent time in “orphan home”
• Escaped and lived with grandmother – hunger, beats him
Richard Wright
• 1890 – “Separate but Equal” – Plessy vs. Ferguson
• Named after a show in which a white minstrel “blacked up”
• Established after Civil War & the Reconstruction that followed
• “Whites Only” “For Colored Passengers”
• Left blacks without any qualifications
• Menial/Underpaid labor
• Libraries = Whites only
Jim Crow Laws
• Menial and underpaid labor
• Moved north in 1927
• No Jim Crow signs, but a clear color line
• North is implicitly racist (De facto segregation)
• Wright knew he had to speak meekly in monosyllables with
deliberate stupidity
• Racism was endemic to America overall
• Acute overcrowding, disease, many other problems
Wright Moves to Chicago
Improvements
• Library access
• Blacks pooled time, money, resources
• Concentration of resources led to black-run
organizations, new charities, newspapers,
magazines, banks, sporting clubs
Chicago
• Became a member in 1934 – actively wrote to promote
revolutionary feelings in Chicago’s working class
• Explained systems and histories that generated terrible
upbringings
• Ghetto = capitalism’s offspring
• Sign of its addiction to underpaid labor / dependence on
inequality
• Made Wright feel a sense of belonging
• Mainly agreed with untenable cruelties of capitalism
• Homogenized, deindividualized, controlled
• Eventually separated because he was unsatisfied with their
commitment to combating racism and inequality
Wright discovers Marxism
• Exposed intellectual dishonesty of racism
• Small acts of intimidation/discrimination secretly
acknowledge potential for black equality
• Wrote Twelve Million Black Voices (1941),
Black Boy (1945)
Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)
• Wealthiest black author of his time
Richard Wright - Author
•
•
•
•
Main character: Bigger (Antihero)
POV: Third person limited
Setting: Chicago – 1930s
Plot: A black man is justly accused of murder, but his
actions are so shaped by cultural, social, and economic
forces that his actions were out of his control.
• Published: 1940 (Modernist)
What are we reading?
• Feminist Readings
• No strong female characters
• Strips women of wit and courage and replaces it with
violence
• Rape, dismemberment, death
• Violence perpetrates on female body
• “Female characters are flat, one-dimensional characters,
portrayed primarily in terms of their relationships to the
male characters…”
Criticisms
Can literature fight injustice?
• Social commentary on
• “guilt-hate-fear complex” – Robert Guthrie
• Whites = unaware of deep-seated racial prejudices
• Blacks = unable to express themselves with
words/economical power use physical power in an effort to
avoid confronting fear that leads to violence
• Both groups see each other as frightening and untrustworthy
Native Son
• Go to
• http://today.io/152g4
• Use your first name and last initial
• Ex: Sarah C
Conversations
“the Negro people did not ask for [their cultural
nationalism], and deep down, though they express
themselves through their institutions and adhere to this
special way of life, they do not want it now. This special
existence was forced upon them from without by lynch
rope, bayonet and mob rule.”
Wright believed cultural nationalism kept racism alive.
Do you agree? Disagree? How do we solve the problem?
Is this present today?
Unwanted Common Black
Culture
What do you do when you
feel powerless?
Are people a product of
their environment?