Black Boy (1945) is a memoir by American author Richard Wright, detailing his upbringing. Wright describes his youth in the South: Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, and his eventual move to Chicago, where he establishes his writing career and becomes involved with the Communist Party. Black Boy gained high acclaim in the United States because of Wright's honest and profound depiction of racism in America. While the book gained significant recognition, much of the reception throughout and after the publication process was highly controversial.

Background

Richard Wright's Black Boy was written in 1943 and published two years later (1945) in the early years of his career. Wright wrote Black Boy as a response to the experiences he had growing up. Wright cites his family and childhood environment as the primary influence in his writing of the book. Specifically, Wright's family's strong religious beliefs imposed on him throughout his childhood shaped his view of religion. Wright recognized the power of reading and writing to stimulate "new ways of looking and seeing" at a young age.

"The Horror and the Glory"

In an effort to achieve his dreams of moving north, Wright reluctantly steals and lies until he attains enough money for a ticket to Memphis. Wright's aspirations of escaping racism in his move North are quickly disillusioned as he encounters similar prejudices and oppressions amidst the people in Memphis, prompting him to continue his journeys towards Chicago.

The youth finds the North less racist than the South and begins understanding American race relations more deeply. He holds many jobs, most of them consisting of menial tasks: he washes floors during the day and reads Proust and medical journals at night. At this time, his family is still suffering in poverty, his mother is disabled by a stroke, and his relatives constantly interrogate him about his atheism and "pointless" reading. He finds a job at the post office, where he meets white men who share his cynical view of the world and religion. They invite him to the John Reed Club, an organization that promotes the arts and social change. He becomes involved with a magazine called Left Front and slowly immerses himself in the writers and artists in the Communist Party.

At first, Wright thinks he will find friends within the party, especially among its black members, but he finds them to be just as timid to change as the southern whites he left behind. The Communists fear those who disagree with their ideas and quickly brand Wright as a "counter-revolutionary" for his tendency to question and speak his mind. When Richard tries to leave the party, he is accused of trying to lead others away from it.

After witnessing the trial of another black Communist for counter-revolutionary activity, Wright decides to abandon the party. He remains branded an "enemy" of Communism, and party members threaten him away from various jobs and gatherings. He does not fight them because he believes they are clumsily groping toward ideas that he agrees with: unity, tolerance, and equality. Wright ends the book by resolving to use his writing as a way to start a revolution: asserting that everyone has a "hunger" for life that needs to be filled. For Wright, writing is his way to the human heart, and therefore, the closest cure to his hunger. None of Wright's other books follow the truths of his life in the way Black Boy does.

The style in Black Boy is so highly regarded because of the frankness that defied social demands at the time of Black Boy’s publication. Wright negates the racially based oppression he endured through his ability to read and write with eloquence and credibility as well as with his courage to speak back against the dominant norms of society that are holding him back. The theme of violence intermixes with the notion of race as Wright suggests that violence is deeply entrenched into a system where people are distinguished based on their race. Wright's longing to journey North in search of improvement embodies the slaves longing to follow the North Star on the freedom trains in search of freedom. By December, when Wright delivered the book to his agent, he had changed the title to American Hunger.

Parts of the Chicago chapters were published during Wright's lifetime as magazine articles, but the six chapters were not published together until 1977, by Harper and Row as American Hunger. In 1991, the Library of America published all 20 chapters, as Wright had originally intended, under the title Black Boy (American Hunger) as part of their volume of Wright's Later Works. Wright was willing to change his Black Boy book to get a second endorsement. The list, which was compiled by numerous individuals and institutions, acclaims Black Boy as "the author's account of his boyhood [that] is a grim record of frustration, race tension, and suffering". Black Boy was most recently challenged in Michigan in 2007 by the Howell High School for distributing explicit materials to minors, a ruling that was quickly overruled by a prosecutor who found that "the explicit passages illustrated a larger literary, artistic, or political message".

Black Boy has come under fire by numerous states, institutions, and individuals alike. Most petitioners of the book criticize Wright for being anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, overly sexual and obscene, and most commonly, for portraying a grim picture of race relations in America. On 1945, Theodore G. Bilbo denounced this book on the floor of the Senate, describing this book as "obsene" and aiming to excite Blacks against Whites, closing his statement with a "but it comes from a Negro, and you cannot expect any better from a person of his type." In 1972, Black Boy was banned in Michigan schools after parents found the content to be overly sexual and generally unsuitable for teens. The book was later challenged in Lincoln, Nebraska on account of its "corruptive, obscene nature".

References

  • Boy Sparknotes
  • Black Boy Paperback