Throughout my academic career we have always talked about the Civil Rights Movement. We have tried to understand what life must have been like for an African American. The struggle of what the blacks had to undergo will probably never be completely understood, but The Ethics of Living Jim Crow was a very powerful essay that gave an insight of Richard Wright's life and what he endured when racial tension was at its peak.
Richard begun his essay by describing his childhood. What begun as a simple game warped into a plethora of stressful feelings and unanswered questions. Richard grew up in a place where the only abundance was cinders. The only vegetation that he could observe was located in the white neighborhood. There were always wars that broke out between the two neighborhoods but after broken bottles gashed Richard and he was punished by his mother, that's when he started to understand that he wasn't equal.
Later in his life he encountered more racial tensions while he was working. When working for two people, he was beaten for not saying "Mr. Pease." He was then driven off in a heartbeat. It amazes me how black people were treated, and how they were punished for little things that wouldn't even matter in the present world. This was only the beginning for Richard.
There were many other scenarios that he encountered such as being beaten for saying "no" to a drink and after looking at a prostitute in the presence of a white man, he was scolded to never do it again. Richard witnessed a women being brutally beaten and then arrested for wobbling from her wounds because she was supposedly drunk. All of these actions were because of the Jim Crow laws. I find these laws incredibly unethical due to the cruelty.
Even though there were many whites that followed the cruel ways of the Jim Crow laws, there were some that aided the blacks in anyways that they could. Richard explained how there was a white man who lent him a library card so he could expand his knowledge. Just these little things can go a long way for people that have very little.
Reading this essay made me feel a numerous amount of emotions that relate to the movement that changed the way we live forever. I'm very glad I had the opportunity to indulge in this amazing read and I recommend this to anyone who wants to see first-hand on how the treatment of blacks were.
You know, I think you're the first person to mention the people who were NOT racists in this time period.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that many times, their integrity came from empathy--often, like in Mr. Wright's story, they themselves were persecuted too. The Underground Railroad was lined with white people who understood the wrongness of slavery and were also members of excluded religious sects (the Quakers). Later, those who were against segregation were also predominantly victims of other kinds of prejudice.
As a Catholic myself, I find the library card-lending man in Mr. Wright's narrative especially interesting. It's amazing, the compassionate acts and the open-mindedness that common situations will foster between human beings.