A composite Picture of African America A Look at Richard Wright's 'Black Boy' By Henry Kwaghkule

A composite Picture of African America A Look at Richard Wright's Black Boy.

By Henry Kwaghkule.

Henry Kwaghkule

African Americans constitute the second largest racial and ethnic minority in the United States which started in the 16th  century, with Africans forcibly taken to Spanish and English colonies in Northern America as slaves. After the United States come in to being, black people continued to be enslaved and treated inferiors as the native sons and daughters of the country, the circumstances were change by reconstruction and development of black communities, participation in the great Military conflict of the United States, the elimination of racial segregation and civil right movement, and the Freedom of humans by Abraham Lincoln. But before all these, black scholars were able to write some thing for generations to know the panoramic happenings of their time.

Richard Wright's Black Boy is a true picture of all the experience blacks were passing through in America. It is a tragic and a harrowing story of a young negro growing up in a difficult and treacherous world that is dominated by Whites who look upon blacks as Chimpanzees and bush animals with no senses and desirable values...

Racism is captures in the novel where the entire Americans society is polarized along racial lives, with the whites feeling Superior to blacks and having little or nothing to do with them. For a close example in the novel, Richard on his way to Arkansas to visit his Grammy, Richard notices that there are two different lines at the station for people who wants to purchase tickets: one line for blacks and another line for whites. This is what was happening in all areas, discrimination, separating blacks from whites was all over. The even form a movement against blacks occupation known as Ku Klux Klan ( Kkk) to kill any back who fall in love wit a white Lady.

Poverty was one of the major problems of blacks, because the whites succeeded in making it in a way that blacks can not get a well paid jobs, hence they remains perpetually poor and line in shanties and shims, congested in one room apartments, no food eat, at a time the author himself goes hungry for lack of meal in the house. On many occasions he drops out from school for lack of fees. This experience of Richard Wright was a true picture of all what blacks were passing through in 16th,17th,18th, 19th, - to mid 20th centuries..

The author of the novel succeed in painting the picture of what the entire blacks were passing through in his autobiography text. As far as blacks were concerned there was no peace for them, they always live in fear. A black could be kill at any time as in the case of brother, uncle Hoskins who was killed because the whites sees that he is progressing and doing well in his restaurant business. Also in the text Richard Wright' reveals how a black name Bobby was killed for befriending a white Lady.

In the same reality off all odd, if a whiteman's dog bite a black man, he will be left untreated to die. Blacks servants were given rotten food to eat after serving their masters .

To unravel it all, I stand to agree with G.H Levis " art always aims at the representation of reality of truth and no departure from the truth is permissible " what happens real should be presented real within the environment, which Richard Wright' in his autobiographical text tells us the naive of their lives in general. What Blacks were passing through from whites.

The novel is a historical text, a real facts of the suppression, depression, segregation, maltreatment, religious bigotry, indifference, inferiority, violence,  and also trials of Afro- Americans known as African Americans...

Kwaghkule, Henry is an aspiring Poet, a Short Story Writer and a Critic.

Kwaghkulehenry@gmail.com

From Ikoyi Lagos,

Nigeria.

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