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Black Boy Essay

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The book Black Boy, written by Richard Wright, shows the struggles the author goes through growing up in the Jim Crow South during the early 1900s. He writes about his job experiences, the different people he met, and how things changed in different parts of the United States. Richard Wright's lack of social development and opportunities was affected by his physical hunger, lack of income, and racial discrimination.
In some parts of the book, Wright barely has enough money to eat food, especially without help from his grandma. He realized that if he didn’t get money and go to the store with his classmates, he wouldn’t have any friends to hang out with. “Each day at noon I would follow the boys and girls into the corner store and stand against …show more content…

Because Wright’s family has no food, Richard Wright decides to finally find a job that will get him some food at lunch and delivers papers with one of his classmates. Wright continues to sell the newspaper to his friends around the area and makes some money so that he can eat something during lunchtime. However, one of his customers tells him that the newspapers he is selling are actually praising the Ku Klux Klan. This is a complete shock to Richard Wright because he never reads the newspaper. This supports the claim that Wright is thoroughly affected by his hunger because if he wasn’t hungry, he wouldn’t have sold the papers preaching about the Ku Klux Klan. This affects his social development because now the people of the neighborhood don’t trust Wright as much and are even scared of him because they thought that a white man had given him the papers to pass out to their …show more content…

In one particular job, Richard Wright does everything and more of what is asked of him. However, this made the white employees angry for him trying to learn more about the job and put him in a word trap. “If I had said: No Mr. Pease, I never called you Pease, I would have been calling Reynolds a liar; and if I had said: Yes, sir, Mr. Pease, I called you Pease, I would have been pleading guilty to the worst insult a Negro can offer to a southern white man.” This quote makes two bad options for Wright, both probably getting beat and definitely out of a job. His race single-handedly got him fired from a job just because the employees didn’t want him employed anymore. Therefore, getting rid of his opportunity for a

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