Richard Wright Black Boy Analysis

After the Union defeated the Confederation in the Civil War in 1865, a new era in the Southern states began, called the Jim Crow. After the abolition of slavery in the South, black people were still not given the same rights or freedoms as white people even if “all are created equal” is stated in the American constitution. The Jim Crow Laws were state and local laws that enforced segregation in the southern states of the United States of America. During the long era of discrimination and segregation in the Jim Crow South, the black race in America were given the choice to live, risk nothing and keep the status quo, or risk their lives for something better. In Richard Wright's Black Boy, Richard's identity is defined by his choice to reject

When Richard’s stay with Granny and Aunt Addie begins, by him enrolling in Aunt Addie’s religious school, this hostility increases even more. However, he notices many interesting and new ideas and facts which he did not know before, “Many of the religious symbols appealed to my sensibilities and I responded to the dramatic vision of life held by the church, feeling that to live day by day with death as one’s sole thought was to be so compassionately sensitive toward all life as to view all men as slowly dying, and the trembling sense of fate that welled up, sweet and melancholy, from the hymns blended with the sense of fate that I had already caught from life,”

Wright is attempting to read and to write at all costs, even if circumstances or events get in his way, such as Granny not letting Richard read because of religious reasons or how he has to borrow a library card from an Irish religious leader. Later, as Richard has the money and resources to buy books on his own he begins to read more books and he starts to understand what it means for him to be a black man in the south. Wright describes his view on life as a whole after reading a book from the library, “I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once revealed in felling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing what I had read, but of felling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different,” (Wright 248). Richard is finally able to understand racism and that he is a black man in the south through the art of literature. When Wright begins working, he is able to enrich his hobby of reading and writing. Later, Richard Wright begins to notice a new point of view which writing has given him