Richard Wright’s Personal and Literary Responses to Jim Crowism

Few critics have gone beyond more general discussions of race and racism to discuss the impact of Jim Crowism on Richard Wright’s works. This paper examines the impact that Jim Crow laws and practices had on Wright’s life and the way he responded to them in his literature by drawing upon Henry Louis Mencken’s writing style of using the “words as a weapon.” I conclude that Wright’s decision to deploy fiction to help stamp out white racism was part of a political response to what he saw as the complex choices facing African Americans. Wright never ceased to struggle against American racism. Twice he chose escape as his mode of resistance; once when he fled the South in his youth, and once when he left America for France. His life and fiction are expressive of his feelings toward Jim Crowism.