Critical Analysis Of A Lesson Before Dying

It was a time in American history that racial tensions were among the highest. Prevalent in the South, blacks were treated as inferior to whites, granted unequal opportunities, and deprived of basic liberties. The Civil Rights Movement demanded equality in the post-Civil War South infested with Jim Crow and Black Codes. It is through Gaines’ literary piece of A Lesson before Dying that attention is shed upon the social injustices in the judiciary system, educational system, and racial relations in a small, southern agricultural community during the mid-twentieth century.
However, some might suggest that Gaines’ true intention of this literary piece was based upon the strong correlation between the community and the church providing direction, …show more content…
It was during the early-twentieth century that certain rules and regulations known as Jim Crow laws became effective in the South to segregate facilities and interactions between whites and blacks. Blacks were forced to enter and ride in the back of buses, forced to use separate and unequal restroom facilities, forced to use separate water fountains, forced to get their food in the back of restaurants instead of dining in. According to Grant in the novel, “There was not a single telephone in the quarter, not a public one anywhere that I could use before reaching Bayonne, and Bayonne was thirteen miles away” (Gaines, 25). Gaines addresses common inconveniences of blacks during this time and persecution they faced within their own communities. Further dehumanization of backs continued which Gaines demonstrates in his novel. Since the days of slavery, blacks were deemed more animal than human. This led to blacks being registered as property within wills and federal censuses. However, this despicable ideology continued into the mid-twentieth century which Gaines highlights in A Lesson before Dying. “Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this” (Gaines, 8). This commentary is from the prosecutor in the novel who is convicted Jefferson of a crime in which they have no proof he committed. Yet, the panel of jurors who were unequally represented of the local black population seized to care about Jefferson’s humanity and innocence and so he was sentenced to death by electrocution. It was during this period that watching criminals be put to death was a spectacle. Blacks were often more likely to be put to death instead of staying in jail and living on taxpayers’ money. Again, Gaines addresses the discrimination of blacks within their own communities and laws that were enacted to maintain blacks separate from