the Black Arts Movement to African-American
literature, particularly within certain quarters of
the academy, it was truly the most African Ameri-
can–centered and revolutionary movement in Af-
rican-American art and culture during the 20th
century. The artists raised black consciousness, in-
stilled pride in blackness, and influenced the shift
in the national spotlight onto the evils of Ameri-
can racism and its effects on African Americans.
Today, many Black Arts Movement artists, includ-
ing Giovanni, Sanchez, Madhubuti, and Baraka,
continue to pursue their art, are ardent activists,
and serve as mentors to a younger generation of
African-American artists.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baraka, Amiri. “It’s Nation Time.” In Black Fire: An
Anthology of African American Writing. New York:
William Morrow and Company, 1968.
Gayle, Addison. The Black Aesthetic. New York: Dou-
bleday, 1971.
Hampton, Henry. Not a Rhyme Time, 1963–1986.
Film. Blackside, 1999.
Neal, Larry. Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts
Movement Writings. New York: Thunder’s Mouth
Press, 1989.
Randall, Dudley. The Black Poets. New York: Bantam
Books, 1971.
Deirdre Raynor
Black Boy Richard Wright (1945)
An innovative genius, RICHARD WRIGHT, author
of the classic novel NATIVE SON (1940), was born
on September 4, 1908, in Natchez, Mississippi,
where, while growing up, he became aware of
“the ethics of living Jim Crow,” confronting and
combating (usually through deception) the rac-
ism and segregation he encountered, from places
of employment to the public library from which
he was legally barred. In Black Boy (1945), the first
part of a longer autobiographical work, American
Hunger, Wright documents the atrocities of his
poverty-ridden life, symbolized by his incessant
hunger; the instability his family had to endure
after his father, a sharecropper, abandoned them,
and the insecurity and fragmentation that marred
the family’s life when his mother became perma-
nently disabled, forcing them to seek sanctuary in
the homes of various family members.
Black Boy begins with four-year-old Richard set-
ting fire to the curtains in the family home, partly
to combat his boredom and partly to rebel against
his restrictive parents, who had forbidden him
from touching the curtains. Naively, he takes refuge
under the burning house to escape punishment,
only to be found and severely beaten by his parents,
who were frightened by their inability to find him.
The adult Wright reports, “I was lashed so hard and
long that I lost consciousness. I was beaten out of
my senses.... A doctor was called” (13).
Wright, whose Black Boy, like the best slave
narratives, moves beyond the personal narrative
of an individual to represent the general experi-
ence of the black southern masses, suggests that
the life of black sharecroppers living in the South
at the turn of the 20th century was not unlike that
of former slaves, for whom the quest for freedom
was paramount. He further reveals, through his
parents’ brutal response, a form of misplaced ag-
gression, the way some blacks internalized their
oppression. The child’s psychological damage and
sense of betrayal are symbolized in young Rich-
ard’s dream: “Whenever I tried to sleep I would
see huge wobbly white bags, like the full udders
of cows, suspended from the ceiling above me....
I could see the bags in the daytime with my eyes
open and I was gripped by the fear that they were
going to fall and drench me with some horrible
liquid” (13).
Not surprisingly, the adult Wright would
broodingly write;After I had outlived the shock of childhood,
after the habit of reflection had been born in
me, I used to mull over the strange absence of
real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our
tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we
were, how void of great hope how timid our
joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our
memories, how lacking we were in those in-
tangible sentiments that bind man to man and
how shallow was even our despair (45).50 Black Boy