The Moral Landscape of Pre

The Moral Landscape of Pre Civil Rights America The United States has always suffered from a fundamental identity crisis. Ideologically committed to the extension of an admirable set of values, most centrally those of liberty, justice and human equality, its growth to a nation of incomparable prosperity was in many ways facilitated by its combined plenteousness of natural resources and a system of unfettered free labor known as the slave trade. As the Founding Fathers and framers of the U.S. Constitution would begin the charge toward the war for independence from England, this contradiction would become an issue of increasing importance, particularly due to the seeming moral implications of the fledgling democracy's new doctrine granting legal protection to the great values above mentioned. However, a set of cultural, economic and ideological divisions, especially as delineated by the regional gaps that would spark the Civil War, prevented the Constitution from having this immediate impact. The Civil Rights movement a century thereafter would demonstrate that for the bulk of its history, the United States has claimed a deeply moral code of laws and ideals but has more frequently engaged in a deeply immoral perpetuation of a racially oppressive and unequal system. This is a condition which defined the racial experience of blacks in the United States for much of the early and middle 20th century where, in the adaptation of a first generation of free-born black Americans, white America's virulent exclusions would have a decidedly negative effect. As described in works by novelists Richard Wright and, thereafter, by James Baldwin, the immoral racialist fabric of American culture would manifest devastatingly in the lives of ordinary black citizens struggling to adjust to a nation of new laws but many of the same lingering prejudices. The authors do go about this task differently, even though research denotes them to have been close friends and colleagues. To Wright, there is a fundamental sadism to the experience of American racism that manifests as a breakdown of morality for the black man himself. As Wright conjectures, America's historical perpetuation of an institutionalized and virulent racism has shaped the identity of the African American population in many ways. Among these, one of the most fundamental causes for said population's greater vulnerability to poverty, crime and violence is a sustained disenfranchisement that has deprived America's blacks of a national identity. This is the complex socio- cultural disposition that drives Wright's Native Son. Understanding the content of the novel and analyzing the suggestion of its title, one is apt to believe that lead protagonist/antagonist Bigger Thomas is a native to his home, the United States. However, in this paradox, the reader is likely to note that Bigger Thomas is denied throughout the story and alienated from his homeland due to an immoral racial bigotry which places Bigger in an isolated, lonely, discriminatory society. This has the impact of shaping Bigger into an inhumane and violent creature whose absence of identity enables him to commit monstrous acts with relative indifference. Ultimately, the course of events around which Richard Wright's important 1940 novel on political and racial issues of the time centers is Bigger's lifelong disengagement from the society that has given him so little. Wright does not take long to introduce, simultaneously, the miserable conditions of Bigger's life and the formative responses which have manifested within him. In the opening sequence of the novel, Bigger and his brother are forced to hunt and kill an enormous rat while his mother and sister stand on the bed and watch in terror. After succeeding in bludgeoning the rat to death, Bigger proceeds to dangle the vermin's body in front of his child sister, Vera. When Vera faints from terror, Bigger shows no sympathy or even cognizance of his actions. His mother's anger is palpable as she articulates Bigger's vices, charging at him, "Suppose those rats cut our veins at night when we sleep? Naw! Nothing like that every bothers you! All you care about is your own pleasure! Even when the relief offers you a job you won't take it till they threaten to cut off your food and starve you!"(Wright, 12) The job to which she refers here, the position of chauffeur for a millionaire philanthropist, is one which would ultimately be the forum for the true repercussions of Bigger's nature. Following a violent altercation with a member of his gang, and his subsequent expulsion from the gang's hang-out, Bigger finds himself forced to interview for this job. During the interview, the overwhelming fear he suffers from his first exposure to the enormity and excessiveness of white wealth begins to offer insight into the cause of Bigger's internal turmoil. The contrast between this lifestyle and that of his family brings to bear a concrete sense of the immoral social landscape that has shaped his world. Bigger's brief tenure of employment for a wealthy, white family invokes a change in him. The anger and inhumanity that had always guided his actions, is now inflamed by a target for his resentment resentment. As Bigger drives his employer's daughter Mary and her communist boyfriend through the black neighborhood, her disposition leaves him silently incensed. She speaks of the neighborhood with distant empathy, addressing the residents therein collectively to Bigger as 'you people.' Though he has no external response, it sparks his rage. Wright tells that "there was silence. The car sped through the Black Belt, past tall buildings holding black life. Bigger knew that they were thinking of his life and the life his people. Suddenly he wanted to seize some heavy object in his hand and grip it with all the strength of his body and stand in the naked space above the speeding car and with one final blow blot it out-with himself and them in it." (Wright, 70) The decidedly low value that he appears to place on human life extends from the low value which had been applied to his life, suggesting one of the major psychological themes of slavery and the subsequent segregation of the mid 20th century. Particularly, the notion that moral applications were not meant with regard to the treatment of black Americans precipitated the conception in Wright's works that in turn, the black American has been denied the opportunity to develop a sense of moral justice. Thus, to Bigger, his anger becomes the channel through which justice is to be served rather than through morality. He resents his family's dependency upon him and his mother's constant disparagement. Likewise, he has no opportunities to speak of and his education and talents are modest to poor. A peephole into white lives, which appeared to be filled with a comfort and ease that juxtaposed grotesquely with the squalor and peril of black lives, forced to the surface in Bigger a perhaps unwitting awareness that the affluence of one race precipitated the misery of the other and vice versa. But Bigger's disposition speaks to a widespread condition amongst blacks in the years to follow abolition. Unbeknownst to Bigger, he is a product of an economy and a political system which are both dramatically unequal. Indeed, the focus which Wright pays to the trials of this single malevolent figure reveals an unpleasant archetype in Bigger for the type of man created by the immoral disenfranchisement endemic to slavery and segregation thereafter. Indeed, American politics have actually been shaped so largely by the racism that it is almost difficult to detect today this institutionalized force without the impingement of a major incident. In understanding the moral posturing of our political system in Wright's time, it is important to remember that the nation's growth was founded upon its perpetuation of the African slave trade. Transporting en masse the poorest members of African society to toil on its plantations and agricultural estates, the U.S. achieved its fast economic growth, its role in global resource trade and many conceits of its identity from the permeation of free labor, which enabled the fortification of white power until abolition in the mid-19th century. With this precedent informing succeeding generations on racial perspective, the regions where racism had experienced its strongest and most adversely combated support would continue to reflect this disposition in stark economic contrasts like the one described in Bigger's drive through the black neighborhood. Unspoken but understood in the aspect of the text is that such residential segregation precipitated an inherently negative experience for black Americans. The South, specifically, followed its defeat in the Civil War with an institution of Jim Crow laws which, in addition to replacing slavery with segregation, would continue to channel explicit modes of racial hatred directly through public officials and legislative applications. Though the Civil Rights movement would bring greater clarity to the reality of Jim Crow, which promoted the exclusion of blacks from social, economic or political participation in the white system, it would likewise serve to intensify the feelings of racial friction in its region. Wright's 1940 novel seems to prefigure this in much the same way that James Baldwin's work thereafter would come to resonate in harmony with the increasing activism of the Civil Rights movement. On the threshold of the Civil Rights movement, Baldwin would publish Notes of a Native Son. Though 1953's Go Tell It On The Mountain would be perhaps Baldwin's best known work, it is this explicitly referential dialogic follow-up to Wright's Native Son that would invoke some of the most compelling insights which Baldwin would have to offer on the subject of American racism. This is, indeed, a most effectively lucid examination from the perspective of a deeply self-conscious writer enduring the twin marks in a nation of virulent prejudice of being both African American and homosexual. The result of this vantage is a set of essays that reaches accord with Wright's conception of the socially devastating impact of segregation on the psyche, conscience and real opportunity but also one that takes issue with the brutality of Bigger, a decidedly negative image to be invoked of the black man in America. In his own personage and in that which he discusses, Baldwin proves a counterpoint to the figure in Bigger. A sensitive and saddened respondent to his circumstances, the 'native son' of this text is compelled by deep sense of purpose to resist the implications that would instead cut the character of Bigger Thomas down to something fairly inhuman. To this point, we are given something of his psyche when he notes that "any writer . . . feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent-which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important." Baldwin, 4) Though in an of itself this sentiment seems not to directly concern the speaker's race, it does come to implicate the America in Baldwin's experience as a cold and indifferent place. Where this turns a character such as Bigger into a yet colder and more inherently cruel figure, it denotes a greater need for self-assertion and sensitivity in Baldwin. Quite to this idea we might concede to think of Baldwin as a moral conscience and an ideological leader for the thinking, sensitive and reasoning black American, whose existence was generally obscured. But for Baldwin, this also would present a distinct challenge to his life and ambitions, for as he sought to express himself against the odds generally facing a writer, he did so also under the thumb of an America that hardly sought the types of insights he wished to provide. As Baldwin would report, "one writes out of one thing only-one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands the very real dangers of my social situation." (Baldwin, 7) As to these dangers, they were certainly not merely theoretically. His history demonstrates Baldwin to have been actively involved in the Civil Rights movement and to have cultivated friendships with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Medger Evers alike. (Wikipedia, 1) To witness each of these bold men assassinated for little more than the aggressive moral imperative with which he pursued that which was right in the equality of all races was to reinforce Baldwin's prescient belief in the danger of his own declarations. And yet, he would posit the ambitions of an intellectual 'native son,' somewhat directly drawing an ironic connotation upon Wright's text. Perhaps this would denote something in the progress of the Civil Rights movement-as opposed to America's own moral posturing-which would become increasingly hostile when threaten with the deconstruction of its immoral system. With the ideological thrust of thinkers like Baldwin and his activist contemporaries though, the push for change would also intensify. Thus, in 1957, the integration of public school in Little Rock, Arkansas touched off a battle which would be waged between blacks and Civil Rights advocates on one side, and the political establishment and its rabid base of public support on the other side. The confrontation in which the state's governor called in the National Guard to prevent the desegregation of his school speaks directly to the methods which, only 50 years ago, were at the disposal of racist policy-makers. Indeed, at that time, "the legislative, executive, and judicial department of the state government opposed the desegregation of Little Rock schools by enacting laws, calling out troops, making statements vilifying federal law and federal courts, and failing to utilize state law enforcement agencies and judicial processes to maintain public peace." (Gilliam, 62) A range of responses that suggest a high level of institutional certainty in the moral rightness of maintaining such a system, these were the manifestations of a broad base of public girding for the standards of separation which had in many ways preserved the expectations of white racial superiority in the south. This speaks to the ways in which the moral situation had both been altered by time and had in other regards remained unfortunately intact. Indeed, for African Americans in the coming decades to follow, the Civil Rights movement would be motivated the conditions and inequalities that had created a figure like Wright's Bigger Thomas. The character's anger and maladjustment would point to an untenable set of separate and unequal living conditions that promoted massive disadvantage and a pointed vulnerability to the conditions of violence, despair, resentment and moral disregard that are demonstrated in the above-noted character. Again, in returning to the narrative of Bigger's life, we are given a startling demonstration of how extensively this condition has served to remove the man from a sense of his own humanity. This circumstances of Bigger's crimes, even if indirectly and through accidental misfortune, resulted in the series of gruesome acts which ended with Bigger accused guilty of rape and a pair of murders; of Mary and his alcoholic girlfriend Bessie. Though Mary's death was not intentional, its circumstances would prove unforgivable. If Bigger's malicious thoughts prior to the manslaughter were not sufficient to illustrate the resentment derived of his racial status, certainly the vindication he expresses thereafter suggests his view of the act as being morally justified by sociological conditions. Again, here is reinforced the point that in a morally bankrupt social landscape, such behaviors become considerably more likely to occur. And in the brutality with which they occur here, there is little denying their connection to a sense of black Americans having been more generally brutalized by an unequal social condition. Thus, after the gruesome depiction of his decapitating Mary and concealing her body in the furnace, Bigger contemplates his situation. Here, Wright tells that "he was conscious of this quiet, warm, clean, rich house, this room with this bed so soft, the wealthy white people moving in luxury to all sides of him, whites, living in a smugness, a security, a certainty that he had never known. The knowledge that he had killed a white girl they loved and regarded as this symbol of beauty made him feel the equal of them, like a man who had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the score." (Wright, 164) The idea expressed here once again enforces this concept that some equality of moral action has been perpetrated, not simply justifying Bigger's behavior, but even justifying the type of man that he has become. His moral distortion was reflective of a morally distorted universe. This sense of moral equalization would not last long as Bigger concocts a loosely constructed plan to forge a kidnapping and levy ransom money from the family. It does not take long, however, for Bigger's poorly conceived attempts to cover his tracks to unravel, particularly when Mary's remains surface. Bigger's flight and subsequent brutalization of his girlfriend culminates in a violent gunfire exchange with police officers on the roof of an abandoned building in Chicago's Black Belt. His incarceration, trial and execution provide him with an opportunity, however, to finally come to an understanding about his actions in relation to the set of racial circumstances that had delivered him to the world. Herein, he comes to understand that his divided identity had moved him through life engaged in a constant struggle for moral resolution. Rectification of the rift between the American in him and the black man in him was perpetually evasive. Though there is redemption in the notion that Bigger is forced face to face with the causes and the effects of his actions, Wright does not flinch from doling out a harsh resolution. As Bigger drifts helplessly from capture to execution, he laments over the identity that had eluded him in this life and hoped that in the new one, it would be his from the onset. "A new pride and a new humility would have to be born in him, a humility springing from a new identification with some part of the world in which he lived, and this identification forming the basis for a new hope that would function in him as pride and dignity." (Wright, 275). In his last thoughts, the reader finally glimpses a humanity in Bigger that is greater than fear or rage. There is a sympathetic emptiness penetrating him, the dark outcome of the wholeness which he was denied by the combination of his race and his homeland. Indeed, Bigger was human after all, but fully denied the opportunity to develop a moral sense of himself. In a manner, this period of reflection allows us to consider Bigger with respect to the Civil Rights Movement, which would be divided along lines similar to those distinguishing Bigger from, for instance, James Baldwin. Namely, the non-violent premises of King would contrast directly with Bigger's actions, if indeed we may regard these as some manner of resistance. Truly, if not a conscious or well-articulated resistance, Bigger's behavior is derived from a common origin to the militant preaching of Malcolm X and the tactics of the Black Panthers. Indeed, Bigger's abhorable condition and the resultant behavior underscores the frustration which would afflict many African Americans prior to and during the Civil Rights Era. Though our research characterizes non-violent direct action as being "basically a successful political tact," it also highlights the factors which caused a disciplinary divergence from its tenets. (Gilliam, 118) The text observes of the non-violence movement that "it was logistically difficult to maintain-it required the mobilization and organization of thousands of volunteers [and] it demanded a tremendous amount of emotional commitment-activists were asked to make great sacrifices in the face of economic psychological, and physical intimidation." (118) With great certainty, these are pressures which fomented a split amongst black activists during the Civil Rights Era. The 1965 assassination of Malcolm X brought to greater certainty to the belief amongst many activists that the non-violent means of protest which had been their lynchpin could no longer be considered revolutionary, so much as reformist. "The presence of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, the increasing radicalization of SNCC, and the seeds of the Black Panthers presented serious challenges to the intellectual and organizational hegemony of the traditional civil rights organizations." (Gilliam, 118) The founding of the Black Panthers, a year subsequent to Malcolm X's murder, would initiate a split in the Civil Rights movement that would reverberate through the inception of new legislation and cultural policy. With the non-violent protest movement's goals of integration came a degree of pandering concession which the Panther movement had come to see as untenable. A separate and revolutionary black nationalism could be the only form, this group believed, of liberation. In a manner, this is the same divide that research indicates to us would, to an extent, cause a rift in the personal friendship between Wright and Baldwin. As we will examine hereafter, Baldwin would be critical of Wright for his projection of an antagonist such as Bigger Thomas, who offered a distinctly negative impression of the African American attempting to respond to white oppression. Indeed, Baldwin was extremely harsh in the way he received the characterizations of his people in Native Son, balking at the idea that the social landscape could be sufficient to make Bigger Thomas a sympathetic or effective character. He denotes that "Bigger, who cannot function therefore as a reflection of the social illness, having, as it were, no society to reflect, likewise refuses to function on the loftier level of the Christ-symbol. His kinsmen are quite right to weep and be frightened, even to be appalled: for it is not his love for them or for himself which causes him to die, but his hatred and his self-hatred." (Baldwin, 40) In no uncertain terms, Baldwin condemns the character and, essentially, the effectiveness of Wright's text as a doctrine to the Civil Rights movement. Quite certainly, as the discussion on the splintering of the Civil Rights movement demonstrates, there was vast disagreement on the premise expressed here, with many acting out of a sense of righteous indignation fully justified by their treatment. Ironically, Baldwin was a friend to Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Richard Wright alike. But here, he does distinctly place himself in a camp where activism would be concerned. While this is not to suggest that Wright intends to explicitly project Bigger as a civil rights hero but more that he views Bigger's lost morality as a martyr, with Bigger perhaps being entitled to some sympathy for the conditions that had created him. But Baldwin would argue this to be a dangerous concession to morality, reflecting rather than resisting the madness of a time. His greatest support comes in the innate social maladjustment of Bigger Thomas from Wright's own writing. Herein, Bigger's mother accuses him early in the novel of constructing a wall around himself. Initially a gut reaction to the severe circumstances of his life, this wall eventually becomes the force which divides Bigger within himself. In the void of identity, Bigger is never capable of finding peace, nor does he ever appear to aspire toward that kind of resolution. Rather, the darkness that pervades his civil life, inclined both by the scourge of racism and his own, self-imposed isolation, becomes a darkness within him that shrouds him from achieving emotional fulfillment either through personal relationships or through ambition. So is this demonstrated in his final days, when his family comes to visit him in jail. Vera, to whose suffering Bigger had once been oblivious, sobbed uncontrollably as she saw her brother on the threshold of execution. Its effect on Bigger is considerable, driving him at first to think of himself and of the guilt which her crying inspired in him. But then his thoughts turned to the foundation for her pain, and for that of his mother over her fallen child. It is only at this juncture that Bigger realized that "he had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer." (Wright, 298) This sense of personal conviction is new in Bigger and indicative that the walls that corralled his life toward a straight and narrow path of destruction were diminished. Unquestionably though, it was too late to spare him or the victims of his actions any suffering. But this true-to-life conclusion speaks to Wright's purpose in exploring the psychological ramifications of racism. The recurrent theme of walls is one that eventually precipitates a traumatic collision between those built within and without the lead character. There seems here a recognition of the grievance that Baldwin cites with Bigger who, "does not redeem the pain of a despised people, but reveals, on the contrary, nothing more than his own fierce bitterness at having been born one of them. In this also he is the 'native son,' his progress indeterminable by the speed with which the distance increases between himself and the auction-block and all that the auction-block implies." (Baldwin, 40), In this condemnation, Baldwin concedes that racial conditions have interceded to impact a man like Bigger, but that more importantly, Bigger has done nothing to better himself by the opportunity of freedom. The idea that he is enveloped by self-made walls is reinforced here. The confluence of these walls, the self-imposed and the racially- imposed, speaks to Wright's primary intent. Though there is a great deal of warranted anger in "Native Son," its critical focus is actually spread amongst culprits. Unquestionably, the virulent racism of America, represented equally by the Ku Klux Klan and the destitute poverty of black life, is deserving of blame. But likewise, Wright points to the self- righteous hypocrisy of the so-called liberal agenda, herein identified with the communist party. Though its intentions are superficially positive, Wright does not spare social progressives, depicting many of them as often being senseless ideologues and career opportunists rather than true humanitarians. Also of important note is that Wright does not spare black Americans of responsibility either. Using Bigger as a vessel for the plight of African Americans, Wright admonishes that violent behavior and withdrawal from social responsibility are not acceptable responses to their conditions. The bold aim which Wright takes at all parties in the racial circumstances of his time ultimately has the impact of sharpening the points of detraction levied at each of them, revealing a crucial reality that the resolution of America's inequalities is a responsibility to be shared by all people in a morally bankrupt social circumstance. This points to another interesting theme in the work of Baldwin, who directed critical attention to the blind racism which black Americans also expressed. In Go Tell It On the Mountain, his characterization of Gabriel, the abusive preacher, would suggest a rejection of the outright hostility toward whites that would become an aspect of the Black Panther agenda. Gabriel's racism would be characterized as a negative counterpoint to the more ethically seated perspective the novel's more moderate characters. Baldwin would offer the impression that he rejected this hostility as counter-productive to the Civil Rights movement. Therefore, where he viewed that a character such as Bigger Thomas seethed with hatred, he viewed no opportunity for peace through such a vessel or anything thereby represented. In a sense, this helps to suggest Baldwin's moral grounding in the pacifist civil rights agenda. The character of Gabriel from Baldwin's earlier novel would also reveal a moral issue relevant to the experience of blacks in America in the period following abolition and leading into the Civil Rights movement. Namely, as a preacher who commanded a fear and obedience in Jesus Christ, he nonetheless behaved immorally. Gabriel drank, was violent and was prone to treat his stepson with derisive invective. This suggests a disconnect between devout Christian faith and true observance of its moral imperatives. Such a disconnect points to the manner in which religion had long been foisted upon blacks in America, first as slaves and thereafter as a matter of habit. The morally bankrupt nature of the religion foisted upon them is revealed by Baldwin's distaste for organized religion in general. Baldwin relates at one point in Notes his awareness of the hypocrisy which roots the religion given to the African Americans by tracing it to the moral implications of the Christian missions to Africa which would ultimately coalesce into the slave trade. He tells that "there is a custom in the village--I am told it is repeated in many villages-of 'buying' African natives for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. There stands in the church all year round a small box with a slot for money, decorated with a black figurine, and into this box the villagers drop their francs. During the carnavale which precedes Lent, two village children have their faces blackened and fantastic horsehair wigs are placed on their blond heads; thus disguised, they solicit among the villages for money for the missionaries in Africa." (Baldwin, 163) There is a clear economic motive in the displacement of Africans and the manipulation of their investment in Christian faith and values. Indeed, this helps to define a distinction between Christianity, a force prompted by the teachings of Jesus Christ to endow man with charity, fellowship and ethicality, and the exploitation of Christianity, which would render it a malleable social structure with the misappropriated power to shape collective ideology. The evangelical underpinnings of the lifestyle and culture persisting in the American southland before the Civil War served to empower the slave-master, arming him with the support of a deeply ideological, politically central and socially influential core of white loyalists. Such is to explain the sanctimony of slaveholding's inherent abuses of moral correctness according to the evolving contextual relevance of the gospels and teachings of Jesus. Its omnipresence and even its defining impact on the region would be fundamental in maintaining a base under an institution that in most parts of the world had been articulated as philosophical repugnant and promulgated as illegal. But there is an even more persuasive and dangerous degree to the effect which Christianity's false meritocracy bore on the continuation of slavery. Great abolitionists and autobiographer Frederick Douglass points to religious imperatives as foundational tools in suppressing the human instincts toward individual freedom which, he asserts, would surely have provoked insurrection if not properly manipulated and obscured. Christianity's pervasive appendages would prove instrumental channels for this type of manipulation, orienting the slaves themselves toward the faith's presumptions and erasing what might otherwise be seen as an inherent doubt as to the moral rightness of the system. Baldwin looks at this as something distinct in American culture and used to justify the practices which seems most to benefit it. As he contends, "Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration such as we are given for heroism on the field of battle." (Baldwin, 31) To Baldwin's conception, the Christian tradition, the Constitution and the white citizens of America had conspired to overlook the very obvious moral truth of the nation's racial sins. Of course, Wright's character seems to make the argument that these sins have come to roost for white America in figures like Bigger Thomas. Perhaps many of the militant activists who affiliated with such groups as the Black Panthers would have agreed with this premise. However, it is in response to this very idea that Baldwin offers the above sentiment. It is his intent to prevent the lionization of a man such as Bigger just as soon as he would intervene in the same glorification of the Christian value system where the treatment of the black community would be concerned. On the subject of Bigger, he would continue on to reject the simplicity of belief which would allow black Americans to project this character as heroic for the sheer boldness of the novel. Here, Baldwin argues that "such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before- which was true. Nor could it be written today. It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues, and colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen. We have yet to encounter, nevertheless, a report so indisputably authentic, or one that can begin to challenge this most significant novel." (Baldwin, 31) To Baldwin, there is a danger in justifying, let alone glorifying, the violence and antisocial responses to a morally flawed social landscape. Bigger becomes a false archetype for black Americans, confuting the presence of far more laudable figures such as those that would begin to emerge in the public eye in the years following Wright's work. To this extent, Baldwin seems to argue that the moral perspective in Native Son is flawed in its failure to prefigure social integration of African Americans that would begin very slowly. By the time of Baldwin's writing, the extremity of Wright's characterization certainly still remained a formative factor in the Civil Rights movement's outlook. And to an extent that is unfortunately made undeniable by the demographic patterns of crime in the United States today, it may be argued that individuals like Bigger remain a common byproduct of a condition of inequality. Therefore, allegations made by Baldwin as to the lack of authenticity in the characterizations found in Wright's novel may proceed from too optimistic a perspective. The suggestion that Bigger should be seen as an anomaly due to his own internal maladjustment may itself be unrealistic, given the degree to which conditions of poverty, community violence, gang activity, decayed family structure and exposure to addiction tend to plague many predominantly African American neighborhoods. This suggests that many of the moral themes discussed here throughout, associating the moral distortion of a society with the moral trespasses of afflicted individuals, may still be at play today. And in many ways, this justifies Baldwin's distaste for such a character, which seems almost to validate this general response to the conditions of racial inequality. The dispensation with moral prerogatives contrasts sharply Baldwin's belief in the eventual achieving of racial harmony. He expresses this point within the framework of a Civil Right movement increasingly serving to change the nature of the African American in social settings. Here, he would denote that "I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." (Baldwin, 9) This is an important sentiment upon which to resolve the discussion here, as it suggests not as much a rejection of the moral landscape of the United States but a belief in its capability to be changed for the better. To Baldwin, the nation would be in an apparent state of evolution and at a point of increasing readiness to accept the changes that were imminent. For Wright, composing his statement more than a decade prior, the perspective would be dramatically different. In Bigger Thomas, he would seem to lash out against the white establishment and charge it with the creation of this monstrous creature. Baldwin, by contrast, would hold a mirror up to black America and demand it to respect that which it saw in its reflection. This pride and intelligence would help his work to transcend Wright's, certainly important in its own time. Baldwin's would be the altogether more moral statement and one that would promote the type of harmony needed to place America on the moral footing proclaimed by its own lofty Constitutional claims.