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I really loved reading Richard Wright's "How Bigger was Born". I am taking a Baldwin course this semester which I am so so intrigued by and this piece really resonated with a lot of his works I've read. I think it also allowed us to get a view of what a black person was feeling during the Civil Rights Movement. It's always important while reading pieces of work, particularly by African American writers, to be able to understand and I mean really have an understanding of what they have gone through, what the history is, and what the current status is.

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There are generalizations about ethnic groups and then there are generalizations about ethnic groups that become so pervasive that they turn into what we believe about people. Once we let generalizations have that level of power, they become stereotypes, which quite easily turn into prejudices.

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Lynching is the practice where usually several dozen or several hundred people takes the law into their own hands in order to injure and kill a person accused of some wrongdoing. The alleged offense can range from a serious crime like theft or murder to a mere violation of local customs and sensibilities. The issue of the victim's guilt is usually secondary, since the mob serves as prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. Due process yields to momentary passions and expedient objectives.

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The Living Is Easy
Significant reading for this module because she was one of the handful of black women writers published in the forties

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“Jim Crow” was a derisive slang term for a black man. It came to mean any state law passed in the South that established different rules for blacks and whites. Jim Crow laws were based on the theory of white supremacy and were a reaction to Reconstruction.

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founded in 1866

extended into almost every Southern state by 1870

the Civil Rights Movement of 1860 caused a surge of Ku Klux Klan activity which included, bombings of black schools and churches, and violence against black and white activists in the South

Fact: Medgar Evers was assassinated by the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. Evers was a civil rights leader and was a friend of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.

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Invisible Man
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

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writer, civil rights activist

highly considered author

wrote mostly non fiction essay and fiction novels

born in Harlem but moved to France, where he died

Baldwin was also a gay man, which is reflected in several pieces of his writing

Sonny's Blue's
“Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”

“It's the only light we've got in all this darkness”

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How "Bigger" was Born
"The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect. But let me start with the first Bigger, whom I shall call Bigger No. I."

"I made the discovery that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white, too, and there were literally millions of him, everywhere."

Fact: James Baldwin knocked on Richard Wright's door and told him that he wanted to be a writer. The two were very good friends until Baldwin made a bad review of Richard Wright's Native Son (Hence Baldwin's Notes of A Native Son)