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RICHARD
WRIGHT - BLACK BOY
A Teacher's Guide for Secondary
and Post Secondary Educators
by Jerry M. Ward
INTRODUCTION
Although RICHARD WRIGHT: BLACK BOY focuses mainly on the life
and history of an internationally acclaimed American author, the visual
and audio components of the documentary richly contextualize the literature
that Wright produced. In that sense, the documentary synthesizes a great
amount of historical, social and cultural information about the twentieth
century. It can be used to prompt extensive discussions, to stimulate
students to undertake special research projects, to write papers or combine
the arts and/or cultural knowledge into a learning experience.
Since the documentary is ninety minutes in length, planning and scheduling
viewing time for students is essential so that the documentary can be
viewed in either one or two class periods.
Teachers are encouraged to view and discuss the documentary together
and decide whether it is more efficient to use it in teaching one discipline
or if students might profit more from discussions that are not discipline
bound.
The Teacher's Guide is designed for those teachers who want to use RICHARD
WRIGHT: BLACK BOY to enhance the experiences of their students as they
explore many and various school subjects.
The guide is not designed to be exhaustive. It provides ideas for student
activities and assignments, bibliographies of Wright's work, and a selected
listing of background sources. Some older materials are included to suggest
the state of scholarship and thinking about issues within Wright's lifetime
or as reminders of what works might have influenced his thinking. In making
assignments, it is suggested that the teacher add current articles and
books that are deemed appropriate.
The pre-viewing questions and activities are designed to help students
gain background knowledge. The post-viewing student assignments focus
on ways Wright's works mentioned in the documentary can be used to promote
broader inquiries among the disciplines. Because the documentary contains
scenes that portray Negro lynchings and an African woman's bare breasts,
it is recommended that teachers and administrators below the college level
review the program before showing it to students.
Questions and activities are provided in the following disciplines: History,
Education, Psychology, Literature, Sociology, and Political Science/Cultural
Studies. The bibliography completes the guide. Teachers are encouraged
to adapt the suggested questions and activities to the appropriate grade
level and developmental level of their students.
RICHARD WRIGHT: AN OVERVIEW
Richard Nathaniel Wright, the son of an illiterate sharecropper father
and a school teacher mother, was born on September 4, 1908, on a Mississippi
plantation some twenty miles from Natchez, in the community of Roxie.
His parentage is emblematic: his father may be seen as the soil, the concrete
in life; his mother as the world of ideas, the abstractions that shape
our sense of reality. The trajectory of Wright's life from his birth in
Mississippi to his death in Paris on November 28, l960, at 52 years of
age, marks a long and unfinished quest for the liberation of the mind
and the human spirit.
What seems to have driven Wright's quest might be described as the multiple
dimensions of hunger. During his boyhood, Wright's hunger was often physical
due to his father's desertion of the family when Wright was only seven
years old. In fact, the absence of food and of his father became interchangeable
in the boy's mind. When, as a man of thirty-seven, Wright reflected on
his black childhood and youth in the Deep South, he exposed his pain in
words that are haunting: "As the days slid past the image of my father
became associated with my pangs of hunger, and whenever I felt hunger
I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness." The bitterness,
however, is not only directed against his biological father but also against
a whole society that provided grounds for hunger. The painful knowledge
that in the South of the early twentieth century, the ceiling of a brilliant
BLACK BOY's possibilities was indeed low, thus creating a vast need for
fulfillment in Wright's young life. Wright's hunger to develop as a whole
human being was social, psychological, and spiritual. This hunger to be,
to know, and to understand was pervasive, formative, and motivating throughout
his lifetime.
Wright's hunger could not be satisfied by the success of Uncle Tom's
Children (1938), the fame that came with the publication of Native
Son (1940), or Black Boy (1945). These books made Wright a
spokesperson for an entire generation of Black Americans.
Wright could write passionately and eloquently about the meaning of suffering
in the lives of oppressed and exploited people because that suffering
was an integral part of his own life. Wright's material success only seemed
to intensify his awareness that hunger of the spirit is implacable. The
Communist Party had been the only one to take a deep interest in Richard
Wright's life and had at one time offered to teach him to write.
As one views RICHARD WRIGHT: BLACK BOY, one should be very attentive
to what is revealed about Wright's sustained interest in language and
in the affairs of the world. Wright was an especially keen observer and
recorder of the human condition in the twentieth century, and his mode
of engaging issues and ideas was that of the participant-observer.
In the books that followed Black Boy, Wright expresses his deep
interest in the large questions of authority, power, and freedom. Like
Cross Damon, the hero of The Outsider (1953), Wright himself had
existential longings. If one understands this novel as one segment of
Wright's intellectual autobiography, it is easier to understand why and
how he situated himself in non-fiction works and why he was so fascinated
by modern psychology in Lawd Today, Savage Holiday, and The
Long Dream. Whether Wright was analyzing the independence movement
and African culture in Black Power (1954), reporting on a conference
at which Asian and African nations debated what should be their future
in the global order in The Color Curtain (1956), or examining the
political and religious intricacies of Catholic culture in Pagan Spain
(1957), Wright was always the engaged writer, the brother in suffering.
It is the ethos of Wright's voice, his ability to be both victim and asserter,
that insures his authority and is the most enduring quality of his literary
legacy.
QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES BEFORE VIEWING
- Richard Wright was born in 1908, and died in 1960. What significant
developments or major changes occurred in the sciences, American government,
economics, politics, literature, technology, and the arts between these
dates?
- What amendments were added to the United States Constitution during
the period 1908 to 1960?
- What major changes occurred in race relations between l908 and 1960?
Especially address those that occurred in 1954 and later.
- Interview people who were born in the 1920's and 1930's. If available,
use the Internet for interviews. How do the interviewees remember and
describe social and cultural changes prior to 1960?
- Interview family members or others, born before 1960, who have lived
in Mississippi, Chicago, New York, Paris, or West Africa. Inquire about
the problems that were of special importance to them. Do any remember
the Great Depression?
- What did the term "Jim Crow" mean in the South?
- What economic and social conditions may have encouraged large numbers
of blacks from the South to migrate to urban areas in the northern and
western parts of the U.S. in the early twentieth century? Did this migration
have an impact on the South as a region?
- What was the impact of World War I on the Southern economy? Was the
impact of World War II radically different?
- Discuss or write a report on the Harlem Renaissance. Who were some
of the major writers and artists during this period? How does the Harlem
Renaissance differ from what has been called the Jazz Age? Were basic
American values modified by changes in music, dress, and entertainment
during the period of the Harlem Renaissance?
- What are the major differences between plantations before the Civil
War and those that still existed in the twentieth century?
- What is sharecropping? Is the analogy between economic slavery and
sharecropping a fair one? Why?
- Who was H.L.Mencken? Why did many Southerners dislike him?
- Define the following terms: socialism, fascism, capitalism, democracy,
colonialism, marxism, communism. What philosophical and political beliefs
are embedded in each of these terms? Discuss how one might become disillusioned
with each of the above philosophies and/or political belief systems.
- Who was Karl Marx? Identify several of his major works. Why did his
theories about social organization and the relation between labor and
capital have international appeal in the twentieth century?
- In what areas of American life did Communism have the strongest influence
between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II? What
was the reaction of the U.S. to the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution?
- What does the term "alienation" mean? How is it used in
psychology? How is it used in discussions of political behaviors?
- What is the image of African-American culture today and how has it
changed over the last fifty years? What seems not to have changed?
- Define the word "ghetto." What is the historical meaning
of the term? Do we use it appropriately today in discussions of urban
life?
- What is the image of African-American culture today and how has it
changed over the last fifty years? What seems not to have changed?
QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES AFTER VIEWING
- Richard Wright was born in 1908, and Eudora Welty was born in 1909.
Both spent their formative years in Jackson, Mississippi. Compare Wright's
depiction of his childhood in Black Boy with Welty's reflections
in One Writer's Beginnings. What images of a Southern urban community
emerge from the two readings? Create a drawing, painting or three dimensional
representation of your image.
- After reading Black Boy, write your own autobiography. In what
ways are the dominant images in Wright's autobiography similar or dissimilar
to those in your own?
- Identify the following people who are mentioned in the documentary:
Langston Hughes, Benjamin Davis, J.Edgar Hoover, James Baldwin, Paul
Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Orson Welles, Margaret Walker Alexander, Joyce
Ann Joyce, William Faulkner, John Reed, Jack Conroy, Studs Terkel, Arna
Bontemps, Kwame Nkrumah, Katherine Dunham, Frank Yerby.
- What impressed you the most about the documentary? Write a poem, story,
or narrative about what had the greatest impact on you. Illustrate your
work.
- Read some of Wright's short fictional works. Write a one act play
based on one of these stories or dramatize a section of Native Son.
- Do you think that growing up in the South during Richard Wright's
time was better or worse than today? Give some reasons for your opinion.
- Have you visited any of the places mentioned in the program? Contrast
what you saw when you visited and what you saw on the program.
- What reasons can you give for Wright joining the Communist Party and
what reasons can you give for Wright leaving the Party and moving to
Paris?
- Assemble a collection of newspaper clippings and magazine articles
about changes that are occurring on the African continent. Discuss these
stories in relation to the segment of the film that deals with Wright's
visit to Africa.
- Write a paper on crime and violence from a teenager's perspective.
Compare your ideas with the stories of adolescent crime and violence
in Native Son and Rite of Passage.
- Watch broadcasts of trials on TV and read the trial section of Native
Son. Report to your class on the difference between contemporary
court procedures and those represented in Wright's novel.
- Write a brief paper on American writers who have chosen to live in
foreign countries. How were their choices similar or different from
those Richard Wright made in choosing exile?
- If you have access to the Internet, contact students in several of
the countries that Richard Wright visited. Ask them how familiar they
are with Wright's works or the places mentioned in the documentary.
HISTORY: QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES
Native Son, Black Boy, 12 Million Black Voices, The Long Dream, Uncle
Tom's Children, Black Power, The Outsider, and White Man Listen!
are Richard Wright's works that are releavent in the study of history.
- Wright subtitled 12 Million Black Voices, "A Folk History
of the Negro in the United States." What is a folk history? What
are the implications for how we came to understand history if Wright's
book is considered a valid example?
- In what way might Wright's Black Power, which does not pretend
to be history, challenge and supplement official histories of the Gold
Coast (Ghana)?
- Discuss what uses a historian might make of RICHARD WRIGHT: BLACK
BOY. Compile a short bibliography of reference works that would help
a historian probe more deeply into the events that can only be sketched
in the documentary.
- Write a brief research report on American Communism from 1920 to 1945.
How was the growth of the Communist Party in the United States made
easier by the mood of the country during the Great Depression years?
How active were Communists in the labor movement or in efforts to achieve
racial justice?
- Read The Long Dream and examine to what extent it could be
used for understanding southern history just prior to the beginning
of the Civil Rights Movement. What caution must be observed in using
fiction to understand history? Debate the validity of using fiction
by such southern writers as William Faulkner, Ellen Douglas, Eudora
Welty, and Shelby Foote to gain new perspectives on history.
EDUCATION: QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES
Richard Wright's works that may be used in educational studies: Native
Son, 12 Million Black Voices, BLACK BOY, The Long Dream, Rite of Passage,
The Outsider, Black Power, Pagan Spain, The Color Curtain, and White
Man, Listen!
- Discuss the result of the lack of educational opportunities for black
Southerners as these are reflected in Uncle Tom's Children and
in Wright's autobiography Black Boy. Do these results still influence
in some way African-American attitudes about public education in the
South? Explain.
- In 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Wright noted that even if
black schools "were open for the full term our children would not
have the time to go." To what peculiar feature of black education
in the rural South of the early twentieth century was Wright referring?
What forces led to the eradication of this peculiar feature?
- Read Wright's essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" in Uncle
Tom's Children. Discuss how the nature of Wright's education and
social norms might illustrate the tension that still exists between
the ideals of classroom education and what students actually learn in
the world beyond the school.
- How does Wright describe political education in Pagan Spain?
- Examine Wright's depiction of adolescents and anti-social behavior
in Rite of Passage. Does this book provide a frame of reference
for a discussion of the reasons for high dropout rates in many contemporary
school systems?
- Use Black Power and The Color Curtain as focal points
for a forum on education in former colonies in Africa. Involve African
students and students from so-called Third World countries who are attending
schools in the United States. Have we freed ourselves from the biases
implicit in Wright's commentaries?
- Consider that Black Power, Pagan Spain, White Man, Listen!,
and The Color Curtain were not received favorably by critics
or the reading public. If hostile reviews were based on the claim that
Wright lacked the insights and authority to make pronouncements about
foreign cultures, what kinds of special training might be most helpful
for those who might eventually teach in foreign countries? Can Wright's
books help us to identify danger points in the assumptions upon which
American or Western education rest?
LITERATURE: QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES
The Richard Wright Newsletter" (Richard Wright Circle, 480 Nightingale
Hall, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115) provides discussions
of new developments in Wright scholarship and contains an annual bibliography.
- Write an assessment of RICHARD WRIGHT: BLACK BOY with regard to its
usefulness in showing connections between the facts of a writer's life
and his works.
- Compare Black Boy with Coming of Age in Mississippi by
Anne Moody. Despite the differences in age and gender, do both writers
suggest that a sense of place has special importance for the African-American
writer from the South?
- Compare Black Boy with Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez.
Write a paper on how an autobiographer, considered to be in a minority
group, uses diverse strategies to control self-representation against
the constraints of ethnicity and language.
- In 1940, the year Native Son was published, John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Examine
the critical reception both of these novels received. Discuss why these
equally compelling books occupy rather different places in American
literary standards.
- Compare the small number of Wright's haiku in print with classical
Japanese examples of this poetic form. Explain the aesthetic difference
between Wright's poems and those he might have used as models. Write
some haiku of your own.
- Black Power, Pagan Spain, The Color Curtain, and White Man,
Listen! are some of Wright's works. Compare the prose in Wright's
early essays from the late 1930's and early 1940's with the prose of
one of the books listed above. What remarkable differences do you detect?
- Examine Uncle Tom's Children, Black Boy, and Native Son
and try to identify what might be called existential elements. To what
in Wright's life experiences might we attribute his affinity for existentialism?
- Clips from the movie versions (1951 and 1987) of Native Son
are used in the documentary. View these movie versions after reading
the novel. How does the modification of the plot in these movie versions
affect your regard for Wright's novel?
PSYCHOLOGY: QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES
Native Son, Black Boy, Rite of Passage, Lawd Today!, The Outsider,
The Long Dream, Uncle Tom's Children, Eight Men, Savage Holiday, Black
Power, and The Color Curtain are some of Richard Wright's works
that may be used in the study of psychology:
- What do Wright's writings reveal about his understanding of African-American
psychology?
- Discuss the terms "paranoia" and "paranoid." Do
you think Wright could have suffered from delusions of persecution?
Why or why not?
- Was Wright depressed? What symptoms of depression, if any, did Wright
exhibit in his writings?
- One portion of Wright's original Black Boy manuscript was
published as the essay, "I Tried to be a Communist" in The
God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1950). Discuss how Wright weighs
his alienation from Communism with his basic faith in the principles
of Marxism. Explore the special topics of Wright's alienation from organized
religion in Black Boy and from certain aspects of West African
culture in Black Power.
- Discuss Wright's depiction of adolescent psychology in Rite of
Passage. How does it differ from his depiction of the same in Native
Son and The Long Dream? How do you account for the differences?
- Discuss the nature of prejudice and how prejudice was and continues
to be an exceptionally powerful force in American life. What does the
documentary enable you to discern about Wright's responses to prejudice?
- Do you think Wright blamed others for his problems? Do you think it
is psychologically healthy to place blame on others? What is the healthy
way to handle problems, feelings, and fears both real and imagined?
Could Wright have handled his problems in another manner?
- Define the psychological term "projection." Do you think
Wright projected his own feelings on to others? Is projection a defense
mechanism? Of what was Wright afraid?
- Debate whether the traumas Wright reports that he suffered during
his childhood and youth are responsible for his essentially negative
portrayals of women in his fiction.
- Many artists, writers, musicians, poets, actors, etc., have dealt
with personal pain through their artistic endeavors. Discuss the negative
and positive aspects of going through pain in this manner. Discuss what
human needs are met by using this manner of dealing with problems. Did
Wright deal with his personal pain through his writings? What personal
needs did this satisfy for him?
SOCIOLOGY
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(1945) by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Native Son, Black Boy,
The Outsider, Lawd Today!, Rite of Passage, Uncle Tom's Children, 12 Million
Black Voices, and The Long Dream are relevant in discussions
of the sociology of the South, race, and culture:
- What type of society was present in Paris for young black artists
and writers that was not present in the United States during the same
time? Has this changed?
- What reasons can you give for the Communist political party encouraging
Richard Wright's efforts and offering to teach him how to write?
- What description of gangs does Wright provide in Native Son
and Rite of Passage? Do you discern any subtle distinctions in
his portrayal? Is the concept of a gang radically different fifty years
later?
- Review several sociological studies of Chicago prior to 1950. How
do they describe what might be understood as the parallel yet connected
societies inhabited by blacks and whites in an urban environment? What
insights about this phenomenon can be gained from reading Wright's introduction
to Black Metropolis?
- Write a critique of the lawyer's defense of Bigger Thomas in Native
Son. What are the weaknesses of trying to make a case on the grounds
of criminal causation? How are the specifics of sociological investigations
transformed by the language used in the courtroom or by the lawyer's
rhetorical strategies?
- Discuss the caution that should be used in reading fiction that incorporates
sociological information. Use Native Son and Rite of Passage
as test cases for discussion.
- How does Wright treat the subject of accommodation in Black Boy
and The Long Dream? To what degree of cooperation and domination
does he draw attention?
- How did role expectation and role conflict seem to function in Wright's
life? How are they reflected in his autobiographical writings and in
his fiction?
- Is the frequently used term "ghetto" both an accurate and
adequate description of urban black communities in various regions of
the United States?
- Describe the social class to which Wright belonged at various periods
in his life. What does the documentary illustrate about social mobility?
How was Wright's life effected?
- Examine The Long Dream for its portrayal of Southern black
middle class life. Does Wright use stereotypes or is his treatment consistent
with sociological descriptions prior to 1960?
- Do you think the Communist Party wanted to control Wright's writings?
Did they want him to leave the Party? Did Wright think that the Communist
Party should fight more for the plight of the Negro race? Discuss your
ideas.
- What happened to Wright's finances after he moved to Paris? Discuss
how being black and poor or white and poor in the United States would
be different in Paris.
POLITICAL SCIENCE/CULTURAL STUDIES: QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES
For the purpose of cultural studies, all of Wright's works are relevant.
For studies in political science, special attention should be given to
Native Son, The Outsider, Uncle Tom's Children, Eight Men, and
Rite of Passage.
- Why did Communism ultimately fail as an alternative political movement
in this country?
- Discuss what political conditions in the United States made Communism
attractive to Richard Wright and a number of other black intellectuals.
Why did Wright leave the Communist Party?
- After viewing the documentary, examine the term "ideology."
How did the program represent the ideological dimensions of Wright's
life and work? What distinction should be drawn between ideology and
core political values (criteria by which people make political decisions
and evaluation)?
- What features of political economy in urban areas did Wright seem
to be most concerned about in his work?
- What does the documentary urge us to consider about the importance
of race and class in the study of international politics? How did Wright's
sense of himself as a man of the West compromise his authority to speak
for non-Western people?
- Wright attracted unusual attention from government agencies in the
United States, Great Britain, and France. Consider the nature of politics
during the Cold War. Why might Wright's work have been seen as politically
threatening?
- Discuss to what degree the whole of Wright's works constitutes a model
for an individual's study of culture and change.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
I. Richard Wright: Primary Works
Fiction
- Uncle Tom's Children. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938; HarperCollins,
1993.
- Native Son.New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940; HarperCollins,
1993.
- The Outsider. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953; HarperCollins,
1993.
- Savage Holiday. New York: Avon Books, 1954; Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1994.
- The Long Dream. New York: Doubleday, 1958.
- Eight Men. Cleveland: World, 1961.
- Lawd Today!New York: Avon Books, 1963; Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1993.
- Rite of Passage. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.
Nonfiction
- Twelve Million Black Voices.New York: Viking Press, 1941.
- Black Boy.New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945; HarperCollins,
1993.
- Black Power.New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954.
- The Color Curtain.Cleveland: World, 1954; Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1994.
- Pagan Spain. New York: Harper & Row, 1957.
- White Man, Listen!New York: Doubleday, 1957.
- American Hunger.New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
II. Richard Wright: Secondary Sources
Bibliography
- Fabre, Michel and Charles T. Davis. Richard Wright: A Primary
Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. A bibliography of Wright's
published and unpublished works in the Richard Wright Archive, James
Weldon Johnson Collection of Afro-American Literature, Beineke Library,
Yale University.
- Kinnamon, Keneth [with Joseph Benson, Michel Fabre, and Craig Werner].
A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary,
1933-1982. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. The most comprehensive
bibliographic study of secondary sources, including books, scholarly
articles and reviews, newspaper reviews, doctoral dissertations, master's
theses, handbook, study guides, interviews, chapters in books, encyclopedia
articles, and handbooks. Kinnamon has begun to publish annual supplements,
beginning with materials published in the"Richard Wright Newsletter".
Biography
- Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New
York: Morrow, 1973; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
- Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. New
York: Doubleday, 1990.
- Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York:
Amistad, 1988.
- Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography.New York: Putnam,
1968.
- Williams, John A. The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Richard
Wright. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.
Critical Studies: Books and Collections of Essays
- Baker, Houston A., Jr., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations
of Native Son. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972.
- Brignano, Russell C. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Ma
and His Works. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1970.
- Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero.
Boston: Twayne, 1991.
- Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
- Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright.Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1985.
- Fishburn, Katherine. Richard Wright's Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977.
- Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and K. A. Appiah, eds. Richard Wright:
Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistd, 1993.
- Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright.
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
- Joyce, Joyce Ann. Richard Wright's Art of Tragedy. Iowa City:
U of Iowa Press, 1986.
- Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre, eds. Conversations with Richard
Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
- Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study Literature
and Society. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1973.
- Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. New Essays on Native Son. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1990.
- Macksey, Richard and Frank E. Moorer, eds. Richard Wright: A Collection
of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984.
- Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1969.
- Miller, Eugene E. Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard
Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
- Rampersad, Arnold, ed. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995.
III. General Background Sources
- Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Avon, 1965.
- Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre,
1925-1959. New York: Columbia UP, 1969.
- Allport, Gordon. The Nature of Prejudice. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1958.
- Appadora, A. The Bandung Conference. New Delhi: The Indian
Council of World Affairs, 1955.
- Apter, David E. Ghana in Transition. New York: Atheneum, 1963.
- Black, Patti Carr. Documentary Portrait of Mississippi: The Thirties.
Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1982.
- Bond, Horace Mann. Education of the Negro in the American Social
Order. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1934.
- Bottomore, Tom, ed. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1983.
- Boykin, A. Wade, Anderson J. Franklin and J. Frank Yates, eds.
Research Directions of Black Psychologists. New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1979.
- Bullock, Henry A. A History of Negro Education in the South from
1619 to the Present. New York: Praeger, 1967.
- Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi
Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. New York: Oxford UP,
1992.
- Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New
York: William Morrow, 1967.
- Daniel, Pete. Deep'n As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood.
New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
- ________. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969.
Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1972.
- Davis, Allison. Leadership, Love & Aggression. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1983.
- Davis, John P., ed. The American Negro Reference Book. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ; Prentice-Hall, 1966.
- Dees, Jesse W., Jr. and James S. Hadley. Jim Crow. Ann Arbor,
MI: Ann Arbor Publishers, 1951.
- Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton. Black Metropolis. New
York: Harcourt Brace, 1945.
- Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Russia. New
York: Viking, 1960.
- Dubofsky, Melvyn and Stephen Burwood, eds. Women and Minorities
During the Great Depression. New York: Garland, 1990.
- Fabre, Genevi've and Robert O'Meally, eds. History and Memory in
African-American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
- Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967.
- _____________. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove,
1968.
- Foner, Philip S. Organized Labor and the Black Worker 1619-1973.
New York: Praeger, 1974.
- Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Knopf,
1980.
- Gutman, Herbert. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom.
New York: Vintage/Random House, 1976.
- Hale-Benson, Janice. Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and
Learning Styles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
- Hanushek, Eric. Education and Race. Cambridge: Heath, 1972.
- Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American
Communist. Chicago: Liberation Press, 1978.
- Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston:
Beacon, 1941.
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