Point of View

Black Boy is the autobiography of Richard Wright, and thus it is written in the first person. It details his life from age four through approximately his twenties. Through the chronicles of his violent life in the segregated Jim Crow south, and the de-facto segregated north, the author demonstrates the terrible effects of brutal racism. He shows how poverty, violence, hunger, and ignorance shaped the southern black man.

Setting

The setting for this book is initially in the South. Richard is born in 1908 in Mississippi where racism and segregation were firmly entrenched. He moved often due to his mother’s inability to provide for her two boys after their father deserted them. They lived in Tennessee, Arkansas, and later in Chicago, but wherever they lived they experienced the hunger, poverty and fear that were a constant condition for most Negroes.

Eventually they fulfilled their dream...