How Did African Americans Influence Richard Wright

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.” (Richard Wright) In 1945 an intelligent black boy named Richard Wright made the brave decision to write and publish an autobiography illustrating the struggles, trials, and tribulations of being a Negro in the Jim Crow South. Ever since Wright wrote about his life in Black Boy many African American writers have been influenced by Wright to do the same. Wright found the motivation and inspiration to write Black Boy through the relationships he had with his

During the Jim Crow era, blacks were opposed and not treated as equals to whites. The injustice towards African-Americans affected Wright’s emotions distinctively. This era gave Wright the chance to “reveal the psychological and emotional obstacles” (Ellison 30) that separate the African Americans and the whites. Blacks had no purpose of life in the South, and acting a different way than the whites caused harmful effects on them. Whites had different beliefs than blacks, which se the whites at a higher standard. Wright was lucky enough to know that he “was conscious of the entirety of my relation with them” (Wright 196) otherwise, his life would have had damaging effects. Without Wright’s perspective that he had in the South, readers would not be able to understand the specifics of black people living in the South and the suffering they have to go through. He chose to move towards writing to express himself without hurting the feelings of others around him. The “intellectual heritage of twentieth-century Western man” (Ellison 31) gave Wright the inspiration for the topics he wrote about. Despite the disbelief and discouragement of his friends and family, Wright continued to believe in himself, resulting in the various books he wrote. Without writing, Wright would have been unable express himself

Wright influenced the way other African Americans could write. His persistence, his courage, and his insistence on expressing his African American voice later influenced other African Americans writers to share their own stories in their own perspectives. Growing up in the Jim Crow south, it was difficult for Wright to adapt to the conflicting rules of American. The Jim Crow era also made it difficult for Wright to become as influential of an author as he would have liked to be. Wright is just the beginning of many African American authors sharing their own perspective, positive or negative, of the African American