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A Call For Real Choices: Richard Wright's “Down by the Riverside”

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The image above depicts the result of Mann’s choice to have one final act of defiance. This choice resulted in his limp hand trailing in the Mississippi River.  Richard Wright's short story “Down by the Riverside” highlights the need for social change by exposing how white supremacy dehumanizes Black people and creates artificial scarcity along desperation, which ultimately work to harm both Black and White communities. Many of the themes he introduces relate to the Civil Rights Movement, which was a mass protest against racial segregation and discrimination in the Jim Crow South. Wright uses naturalism to represent the oppressive power of institutionalized racism through an unrelenting mass flood of the Mississippi River.  Racism just as much as the flood forced Mann to make hopeless choices that continued to spiral out of control, each further compromising his sense of morality and therefore his sense of self. First, he had to choose between accepting a stolen boat or letti...
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How Audience Has Shaped Black Autobiography

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Images of Harriet Jacobs and Booker T. Washington respectively. When reading any literary work, understanding the audience the author intended to reach reveals fresh layers of meaning. In Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl she clearly indicates through the preface that she is writing for a specific audience: white northern women. Booker T. Washington, by contrast, intended his autobiography Up from Slavery to reach a somewhat broader audience, though it was still largely shaped by white readers’ expectations. By analyzing both texts we see how the differences in audience lead to either emphasis on particular ideas or sanitization of certain experiences from slavery. While both Harriet Jacobs and Booker T. Washington shape their narratives around white audiences, Jacobs exposes the emotional and moral horrors of slavery to elicit sympathy and provoke Northern women into action, whereas Washington strategically edits and moralizes his experiences to reassure white readers ...
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