Richard Wright grew up in the South, mostly in Mississippi, during the teens and twenties. Richard had a rough life from the very beginning, dealing with poverty, his father leaving the family, constant moving, and his mother's paralysis. Richard always had a curious mind and asked a lot of questions- sometimes too many. He was often beaten by his family whenever he spoke up. He often asked about whites and blacks, but never really got any answers. He had to learn about this through stories and experiences, which left him unready to work for whites under the Jim Crow laws. He never wanted to cooperate with the goal of the white south, which was basically to make African-Americans believe what the whites said to them - that they were inferior, they would never amount to anything. Most people he knew had already succumbed to that. When Richard told his friends he wanted to be a writer they couldn't understand it. To them, that just wasn't something African-Americans did.
Richard could never go along with the expectations of the whites and because of that he couldn't hold a job. He would make one wrong comment, use the wrong tone, make the wrong face, and he'd be back on the street looking for a new job. Richard's ideas of breaking free from the mold whites put blacks in would be similar to the ones driving the Civil Rights Movement, that eventually did just that.
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