Richard Wright and John Griffin on the Black Experience

Introduction: Two Perspectives on Race

Richard Wright (1908–1960) and John Howard Griffin approached the experience of being Black in the American South from radically different starting points. Wright lived it from birth; Griffin chose to enter it voluntarily for six weeks in 1959. Together, their accounts illuminate the realities of Jim Crow segregation from both an insider and an outsider perspective.

Richard Wright's Childhood and the Making of Black Boy

Richard Wright's story tells how he grew up one generation away from slavery, the son of a sharecropper and a schoolteacher. He became acquainted with alcohol early, begging for drinks from the age of six. When his father, whom he hated, left the family for another woman, his mother became financially destitute and the family went to live with relatives. Wright moved among his grandmother, then his mother's sister and Uncle Silas, to whom he became close. His grandmother, his mother, and then his aunt — a teacher in a Seventh-day Adventist school — sometimes beat him until he lost consciousness. His Uncle Silas was murdered by whites, and Wright was forced to quit school and go to work. His mother became paralyzed, and Richard and his brother spent time in an orphanage.

Wright felt no commitment to the church, and this lack of religion turned some of his relatives against him. Yet he had thought long and hard about why African-Americans had adopted the white man's religion: "This business of saving souls had no ethics; every human relationship was shamelessly exploited" (Wright 15).

Moving around frequently made it difficult to attend school consistently, but Wright still graduated from middle school in 1925. He was reading mystery and horror stories voraciously and already writing his own. He published his first short story in 1924. He attended high school for a time but did not graduate, and educated himself instead by reading at the library in Memphis, where he eventually moved. He borrowed a library card from an Irish co-worker and forged notes to the librarian so he could read H. L. Mencken: "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?" In this way, Wright had to assume the role of a white man in order to gain a basic privilege.

The poverty and lack of education he observed among African-Americans made him even more determined to become educated and rise above his circumstances. Determined to leave the South before he crossed the Jim Crow restrictions placed on Black people, he bought a train ticket to Chicago in 1927. He felt he could no longer emotionally tolerate the disrespect he encountered in the South.

This was the end of the story as published in the first book in 1945. Black Boy was originally written about Wright's whole life, but the portion covering his boyhood in the South was published first. His publishers deliberately omitted the sections that might prove controversial; those sections were eventually published in 1977 under the title American Hunger. Despite this, the U.S. Senate denounced Black Boy as "obscene" in 1945 (American, 2006).

Works Cited

American National Biography Online, 2000. Long Island University. Oxford University Press. 20 Dec 2006.

Griffin, John. Black Like Me. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Power, Michael. Review. Black Like Me. Wings Press.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper, 1945.