Liberty And Justice In Native Son By Richard Wright

Richard Wright made a film adaptation called “Native Son”, speaking on a time frame where segregation was still present in 1940’s of Chicago, a man was accused of murder. This film took a quick wrong turn when something unpredictable happened causing conflicting views. In addition to this racism played a great deal in his crime to be found guilty. In addition to this racism played a great deal in his crime to be found guilty. The purpose of this essay to examine Richard Wright's film adaptation of ‘Native Son’ and his innocent crime in regards to racism, violence, and poverty, to discuss view of points of whether he is guilty or innocent.

Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, to a poor family on a plantation in Mississippi. His father was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother was a well-educated teacher. Due to his family’s poverty they were forced to move to Memphis. When Wright was five years old, his father left his family for another woman, and his mother was forced to leave her job as a school teacher and do domestic work to provide for her family. As Wright grew up, he became involved with the Communist Party, and in 1940 he published Native Son. This success of Wright’s book made the black community proud of him, but it also brought a lot of uncomfortable feelings. They felt that the main character, Bigger, portrayed a stereotypical, harsh, black man the

The novel Native Son by Richard Wright tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living on the South Side of Chicago. Due to the severe oppression and racism he has faced throughout his entire life, the reader is shown how Bigger has no control over his life and is driven to extreme actions as a result of his fear and anger. Wright displays how media and popular culture in the novel serve as powerful driving forces in emphasizing the destructive racial prejudices that are present in society as a way to solidify these ideas in the minds of its members. Through presenting the media in such a light, Wright criticizes how the media inaccurately presents information to the public

In his most famous novel, Native Son, Richard Wright's female characters exist not as self-sufficient, but only in relation to the male figures of authority that surround them, such as their boyfriends, husbands, sons, fathers, and Bigger Thomas, the protagonists. Wright presents the women in Native Son as meaningless without a male counterpart, in which the women can not function as an independent character on their own. Although Wright depicts clearly the oppression of Blacks, he appears unconscious of creating female characters who regardless of race, are exploited and suppressed. Their sole purpose in the novel is to further the story by putting Bigger in new and more dangerous situations by

In the mid 1900’s, different parts of society struggled with power due to the idea of racial supremacy. The idea of a superior race lead to the racial oppression of blacks, which had deep and lasting effects on society. This can be seen in Native Son by Richard Wright. During this time, power was heavily dependent on race: a concept Bigger Thomas struggled with throughout the entire novel. This can be seen on Bigger’s journey to understand and grasp for power, and the lasting effects of racial oppression on not only himself, but the black community as a whole.

Bigger Thomas is a fictional, 20 year old, Negro male living in Chicago during the Great Depression. This character, created by Richard Wright in Native Son, became assigned with the job of giving insight to the life of a black American male during the 1930s. Bigger lived a life in which he made decisions on impulse, fueled by his emotions. No action Bigger completed became carried out with proper thought and rationality, thus, ultimately ending in his imprisonment and, furthermore, his death. Through the telling of Bigger’s life, Wright shows what influences created a man such as Bigger. In doing this, Wright proves that Bigger Thomas cannot exist as more than a symbol used to highlight the oppression the black race faced post Civil War.

Racism is the most ubiquitous theme present in Native Son because it was written in a time when racial inequality was pervasive in everyday life. There was a large disparity in wealth between whites and blacks simply because whites were given more opportunity in the middle and upper class job section around the country, especially Chicago. The large disparity in wealth is best exemplified when Bigger first walks into the white society where:

The story of Native Son by Richard Wright is one of the greatest pieces of literature which functioned as a massive wake-up call for the American public. According to Irving Howe, when "[t]he day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever." Native Son was written at a time when blacks were stereotyped as brutal and uncivilized. Wright depicts his community’s suffering, poverty and denial of rightful recognition in his works. Wright’s Native Son not only represents history with sociopolitical factors, but also has excellent literary value.

I would argue, however, that Bigger always detested whites treating him like a nobody and after accidentally killing Mary Dalton, he began being more open about he he feels since he had little to lose. Anyway, Bryant’s main argument is that the white world does not see Bigger, and this is one of Bigger’s biggest fears. Indeed, when they accuse him of rape, this takes away the subjectivity that would have been associated with him had he simply been called a murderer. In addition to making Bigger seem less than human by labeling him as a rapist, the authorities do not think that Bigger is intelligent enough to carry out a murder as complex as Mary Dalton’s. All this goes to show that Bigger is a symbol that whites have used as an excuse to discriminate against Blacks, and who Bigger is as a person is not something that really matters. The reason Bigger has negative feelings towards all Whites for the majority of the book is because they only see his skin color.

In Richard Wright’s Native Son, alienation, the state of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or be involved in, is a major theme presented in the novel. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas, faces alienation repeatedly from society due to his identity as a young African American boy living in Chicago. Because of his skin color, in different places, he felt inferior to everyone around him and felt like he had no purpose in his life because of society’s expectations: African Americans ending up in a jail cell for the rest of their lives, making them feel worthless. As a result, he went looking for that power without knowing it. When he killed both Mary and Bessie, he felt that power rush to him. However, Bigger does end up in jail because of his wrong doings. Even though justice was served for the killings of Mary Dalton and Bessie, he did not deserve such a harsh sentence just because he is a darker skin tone compared to the Whites.

Another example in Native Son that proves the difficulty of social integration and obtaining agency is the discussion of oppression in Max’s speech for the court because it reveals the white society’s confused emotions with oppression, and that with it, Negroes can never socially integrate or control what happens to them without making tedious efforts. In Bigger’s court trial, after the prosecution attorney presented his witnesses to the court to prove that Bigger is sane and should be executed for his heinous crimes, Max, Bigger’s defense attorney, gives a speech to try to convince the judge that Bigger’s mental and emotional state deserves to give him a mitigated sentence. One thing Max said in the speech was “ ‘what is happening here today

In his novel, Native Son, Richard Wright shows that society is influenced strongly by racism, and therefore inherently unjust. He then shows the negative effects that such a society has on both the oppressor and the oppressed. By doing this, he attempts to inspire people to rebel against society’s systemic racism and to make meaningful strides towards equality. Wright shows just how unjust society is by demonstrating the prejudice implemented in the judicial system.

When Bigger Thomas brings Mary Dalton home after a night out, he is ever so careful with her, in hopes of not disturbing the rest of the house. He doesn’t want Mary, or even himself to get in trouble, because of Mary’s drunkenness. Mary, indifferent than the white community, “responded to him as if he were human, as if he lived in the same world as she “(Wright 65). Because Bigger felt a little more comfortable around Mary, than he did with her father, he acted in a way that later put him to shame. Mrs. Dalton walks into the bedroom where Bigger and Mary were, which frightens him, making him commit the crime of killing Mary. Bigger thought that he would be caught, so he covers Mary’s face to keep her quiet. Mrs. Dalton’s blindness causes her to not physically see Bigger or Mary, or even the crime that Bigger does. The blindness causes Bigger to both commit a violent act, and get away with it for a short period of time. The physical blindness correlates with the idea that whites do not see blacks as

When analyzing Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright’s protagonist in the novel Native Son, one must take into consideration the development of his characterization. Being a poor twenty-year-old Black man in the south side of Chicago living with his family in a cramped one- bedroom apartment in the 1930’s, the odds of him prospering in life were not in his favor. Filled with oppression, violence, and tragedy, Bigger Thomas’ life was doomed from the moment he was born. Through the novel, Bigger divulges his own dreams to provide for his family and to be anything but a “nobody.” Although Bigger struggled to fight through obstacles to pursue his dreams for the future, his chase for a better life came to an abrupt

Throughout my study of racism in America, violence, gender, class, and more have all been brought to the forefront of discussions of racial oppression. Human sexuality is often subverted in these conversations, although it intersects with all of these forms of racism. African Americans are often subject to sexual stereotyping and objectification which causes them to become rigidly policed by both society and themselves (Gonzales and Rolison 715). Since sexuality presents itself as a significant way in which African Americans are oppressed, sexual persecution presents itself as a theme in many prominent pieces of African American literature. Specifically, these themes present themselves in Iceberg Slim’s autobiography Pimp and Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. Despite the fact that Iceberg Slim’s popular underground autobiography and Richard Wright’s fictional sociological commentary appear to be on separate ends of the African American literary spectrum, both works demonstrate how Black sexuality is policed, objectified and commodified in mid 20th century America. Studies performed by Alicia M. Gonzales and Gary Rolison for their article Social Oppression and Attitudes towards Sexual Practices prove that African Americans receive less sexual freedom in contemporary America, and analysis of Native Son and Pimp will exhibit the ways in which this, sexual oppression, presents itself in societal experiences, and how African Americans are blocked in attempts to escape this