If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls

1.“Boys in the Hood”: Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son

Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son “Boys in the Hood” 1 When the nineteen-year-old Richard Wright moved from Memphis to Chicago in December 1927, he arrived in a city that had been acknowledged as a site of great economic possibility and racial refuge for many southern blacks. Indeed, Wright, like so many other young blacks, arrived in the midst of an era of massive migration from the South that saw Chicago’s black population increase from 44,103 in 1910 to 109,458 in 1920 to 233,903 in 1930 (Drake and Cayton 8).1 Many of these blacks left the South to escape the legal apartheid of Jim Crow life; however, it was the yearly onslaught of diminishing agricultural returns caused by drought as well as by the destructive boll weevil in the fields of the Mississippi Delta that effectively galvanized the majority of migrating blacks to embark upon the mass exodus to the North. And while many black tenant farmers and sharecroppers submitted to the idea of remaining in the South despite economic hardships, large numbers of blacks saw life in the industrializing North as a movement toward economic autonomy and political liberation. Moreover, with the brutal advent of white mob violence and lynching at the close of the nineteenth century, blacks were increasingly inclined to equate travel with freedom and to envision flight out of the South as an oppositional act of preserving their humanity.2 But life in the North for poor southern blacks during the 1920s and 1930s was a hard one and, tragically, the hope of racial justice in Chicago and other northern cities during the years of the black migration was un- 24 Chapter 1 dercut by the reality of overcrowded and dilapidated housing, joblessness, and race riots. These hostile circumstances demystified any prospect of the North as a “promised land” and ensured both class and racial division among poor migrant blacks and city-dwelling whites. Encountering the harsh racism and segregation that would later be theorized as a type of “domestic colonization,” the majority of newly arrived blacks found themselves forced into the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side or what was generally referred to as the Black Belt.3 Indeed, it was precisely in relation to this political context of class hostility and racial violence against newly arrived blacks that prompted novelist Richard Wright to reflect on the personality of this emerging “black underclass.”4 A poor southern migrant himself, Wright was uniquely situated to capture the overwhelming fear and frustration among the black urban poor.5 As author Margaret Walker persuasively asserts in her biography of Wright: Who else but a Mississippi boy, who had lived in rural and urban Mississippi and been wounded by the painful sting of white racism, circumscribed and constrained to a poverty-stricken black world of ignorance and superstition, who had observed the weekly Saturday night razor-cutting scrapes and the drunkenness of tortured and powerless black men killing their own and craving to kill the white man whom they blamed for their depth of degradation and racial impotence, who else but a Mississippi black boy could write with such authenticity of the tormented depths in the soul of a black youth? (148) And like Richard Wright, many migrant blacks were outraged by America ’s social crime against its native sons and daughters. Unable or unwilling to return to the South or to their African homeland,6 they saw no viable alternative other than to stay put in Chicago and fight, resist, and challenge, however possible, the dehumanizing racial injustices of white society. Describing poor urban black life during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Wright’s Native Son (1940) depicts Chicago as a site of extreme racial and political violence. Coupled with severe economic malaise as a result of the stock market crash of 1929, the world of Wright’s protagonist , Bigger Thomas, was largely indicative of white America’s racist and social-Darwinistic disregard for black humanity. Indeed, as literary historian Stephen Michael Best has argued, “One could read causally the Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son 25 relation between declining economic conditions and white terroristic violence , suggesting that the former increased idleness and irritability and led, ultimately, to the latter” (114). For many young urban blacks in northern ghettos of the 1930s, Bigger’s violent rage was an...