African-American Trials and Tales

Richard Wright’s short story “Down By the Riverside” is a fiery critique of racial segregation in the Jim Crow south. Through the usage of black naturalism, Wright paints a rather negative picture of black identity in the south, yet he offers a radical solution to the question of black equality in the form of violence. Wright believed that African American writers historically failed to properly represent their race and instead pandered to white people, which led him to develop a drastically different approach towards his writing of black equality. While the story was published in the late 1930’s, making it technically not a work of the Civil Rights movement, the story was clearly a precursor to many of the different forms of literary protest that would emerge as a result of the Civil Rights movement. His new ideas helped bring forth a new wave of energy and life for the struggle of equal rights, a movement that was led by African Americans for African Americans, not white people. ...

Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” uses the reunion of Mr. Ryder and 'Liza Jane to show the slow process of healing that took place after the Civil War. Even though the story is set a few years after the Reconstruction Era, many of the successes of the era can be seen in the story, mainly the redressment of social inequities that took place as a result of slavery. The Blue Veins society and Mr. Ryder represent how the economic and political inequalities of slavery were redressed by slavery at the expense of colored identity, as they assimilated into white culture by talking like whites, for example, while Mr. Ryder and ‘Liza Jane reuniting represents the social healing that took place after slavery. In both cases, the traumatic scars left by slavery are still present, yet they are covered up and forgotten, most notably in the case of Mr. Ryder. The Blue Veins society, a group which embraces their lighter skin in a way which devalues their colored roots, is difficult for m...