Wright and Brown: Race, Class, and Harlem Renaissance Fiction

Introduction: Two Voices on Racism and Jim Crow

In his autobiographical work The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, Richard Wright describes a disturbing violent scene that was very common among Black communities in the Southern United States. He recounts how one day, while polishing brass at the front of a clothing shop, his boss and the boss's young son (aged 20) drove up in their automobile and got out half-kicking and half-dragging a Black woman into the store. A policeman standing just at the store's corner did nothing but look on, "twirling his nightstick." This poignant image summarizes the essence of Wright's work, revealing how deeply racism was rooted in American society. The policeman's callous attitude — emphasized by the expression "twirling his nightstick" — and his failure to intervene proved that the law institutionalized and virtually upheld racism, allowing the infamous Jim Crow laws to evade federal government oversight.

While Jim Crow violated every principle upon which America was founded, Southern states upheld it as the sole social and political institution for generations. Through enforcement of Jim Crow, America's sacred institutions — including its system of justice — ensured that Black Americans had zero access to financial, cultural, or social capital. As a result, class and race became intricately entwined.

In his poem Bitter Fruit of the Tree, Sterling Brown uses an anecdotal structure to describe the experiences of racial discrimination and how it affected access to power and social class. Brown reflects on his grandparents' generation and how they were taught to remain subservient to White authority figures. Like Wright, who confronted systematic American racism through his personal experiences, Brown writes about how Black Americans were told not to be bitter and to simply accept racial discrimination as a fact of life. The poem's final line — "my brother is bitter, and he does not hear" — answers Wright's implicit question about how Black Americans felt regarding their circumstances. The pervasive mistrust and bitterness toward the White power establishment in America was the sole natural result of systematic racial discrimination, as illustrated by both Brown and Wright in their respective literary works.

References

Anderson, D. (1998). Sterling Brown's Southern strategy: Poetry as cultural evolution in Southern Road. JSTOR, 1023–1037.

Brown, S. (n.d.). Bitter fruit of the tree.

Susan. (2014, September 14). TOW #2 — "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch" (Written). [Blog post].

Wintz, C. D. (2015, February). The Harlem Renaissance: What was it, and why does it matter? Humanities and Texas.

Wright, R. (n.d.). The ethics of living Jim Crow.