“What I Killed for, I Am”: Domestic Terror in Richard Wright’s America

The legal invention and institutionalization of “terrorism” coincided with Richard Wright’s invention of Bigger Thomas, perhaps the most terrifying figure in twentieth-century American literature. This convergence was not merely an accident of history. By framing Native Son within two discourses of “native” terror—the extralegal, community-endorsed racial violence against African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South, and the radical violence of the so-called Red Menaces—this essay demonstrates not only how these terrorisms converge in Bigger, but also how Wright’s protagonist represents a distinctly modern figure for terror. In the courtroom drama with which the novel concludes, Native Son folds back on itself to interpret the manufacture of terrorism; here, Wright charts the basic rhetorical coordinates of an “America under attack,” before raising the specter of lynching as the inevitable conclusion to the terror narrative.