Communism In Richard Wright's Black Boy

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According to the Oxford Living Dictionaries, communism is “a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs”. In Richard Wright’s Black Boy, the audience is able to see how the life of an African American male went during the time of the Jim Crow empowered South. Wright gives the reader a full insight of his life from the time he was four years old until he ends his with his last words and thoughts as a Communist party member. Wright is able to show the grasp that the Communist party had on some of the African American community, contributing to his purpose of showing the struggles of an African American male in the times of the …show more content…

Wright, after hearing about it from a work associate, went and visited a John Reed meeting. This meeting was Wright’s first formal introduction to the Communist party and later led to him attending his first meeting as a member of the John Reed Club of Chicago. Wright states, “Still suspicious, my eyes watching for the slightest anti-Negro gesture, I attended the next meeting of the club. In the end I had to admit that they were glad to have me with them. But I still doubted their motives” (Wright 321). Wright was still a little wary of why the Communist party, more specifically the John Reed Club of Chicago, wanted him to be a part of their ranks.Another example of this is brought up by Thomas Page who brings up how Africa and Communism had a back and forth relationship. This relationship between Africans and Communism involved instances where African writers and filmmakers studied the Soviet Union while the Soviet artists, in turn, used the image African and African Americans in many propaganda posters and other propaganda forms (Page). This relationship between Africa and Communism formed a vision of unity from the Africans point of view and blinded them from seeing the true reason they were being used.These very feelings of unity swept over Wright and allowed him to get his true vision blinded in the process. The biggest thing that blocked Wright’s vision of what the ignorant Communists had fed him was the thought that his writing career was actually going to take off thanks to the Communist editors of the Left Front and the New Masses. Wright was falling into the grasp of the Communist party and this was a simple result of his struggle within the Jim Crow lessened Northern region of the

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