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).

Wright's Reflections on Black Culture and Identity

As a Black boy growing up in the South, Wright suffered poverty and a lack of consistency in both place and parentage. He describes visiting his father in 1940: "standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands," and how, when he tried to speak with him, "I realized that… we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality." This emotional account of Wright's childhood upset both Black and white readers because it confronted the cultural barrenness he perceived in Black life.

The image of his father in that field, set against Wright's own journey away from the plantation where he was born, deepened his sense of their disconnection. He reflected on this in one of the book's most striking passages:

"I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair." (Wright 91)

Here Wright speaks to the fragmented society that drove African-Americans away from one another — echoing the fate of earlier generations whose families were torn apart by the auction block. He framed this in modern terms, however, recognizing an "unconscious irony" in the emotional coldness and detachment he observed. "I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength was our negative confusions, our flights, our fears, our frenzy under pressure" (Wright 93).

Wright also observed in Black Boy what he described as an inability for Black people to fully inhabit their own emotions: "If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world, I'd do it. But I don't believe anything can stop it," he told a friend, adding that the friend "had neither known nor felt anything of life for himself; he had been carefully reared by his mother and father and he had always been told what to feel" (Wright 52).

Wright was "ashamed that so often in my life I had to be fed by strangers." Yet he also acknowledged a caring community around him when his mother suffered a paralytic stroke: "The neighbors nursed my mother day and night, fed us and washed our clothes." He recognized this tension in himself as well: "All my life I have done nothing but feel and cultivate my feelings" (Wright 95). Wright did not publish another book after Black Boy until 1953, when his novel The Outsider appeared.

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.