How Did Richard Wright Influence The Ethics Of Jim Crow Laws

Art can inspire one to look beyond the bleakness of his or her environment and aspire for more. Richard Wright, born in 1908, spent his formative years in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee; unfortunately, all three states were notorious for their observance of the racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws. Biracial author Thomas Chatterton Williams was raised in the suburbs of Westfield, New Jersey, where he discovered Hip-Hop culture and nearly allowed its negative influences to deter him from leading a productive life. Richard Wright developed a love for literature during his childhood and his voracious desire to read imparted in him an outlook that surpassed the limitations that the Jim Crow laws placed upon blacks Americans. Thomas Chatterton Williams’s appreciation for reading developed once he’d enrolled in college and realized that there were books in existence that offered more intellectually stimulating insights than the ones offered in rap music. The two writers had views about literacy and education that the societies they lived directly influenced; Williams and Wright grew up in time periods in which the cultures around them didn’t encourage the intellectual enrichment of African-Americans; and the two writers were motivated to push beyond constrictive societal …show more content…
Unfortunately, one of the white children took things too far and struck young Richard with “a broken milk bottle”, with caused him to bleed “profusely” (Wright 133). When Wright’s mother discovered her son’s injury, she didn’t respond sympathetically, “She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till a fever of one hundred and two”. (Wright 133). Richard was unsure why his mother was beating him for simply being a kid, but she told him that he should be “thankful to God” that the whites in the area didn’t kill him (Wright 133). His mother had good reason to be