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Richard Wright vs. Lorrain Hansberry on Systemic Racism in America

 Both Richard Wright’s “Down By the Riverside” and Lorrain Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” reflect the same system, and display many of the same elements of systemic racism of their time. In “Down By the Riverside”, Mann is viewed with suspicion by everyone around him, despite all of his work rescuing people, or the ways that he is forced to sacrifice himself or his family to help others. Similarly, in “A Raisin in the Sun”, the family is approached by Karl Lindner and the neighbors association, who try to stop the family from moving into a white neighborhood. Both stories exhibit racism rooted in the same assumptions that black people should be kept out of the comfort of white people, but the works differ in their interpretation of what this racist system means for its black citizens.  Wright’s naturalism, and Hansberry’s realism are what set the two apart in terms of message. Naturalism is a more pessimistic framing which argues that man will always succumb to nature, or t...
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Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and the 'Broken Promise' of Reconstruction

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  A specific aspect of reconstruction that Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poetry describes especially well is the somewhat ‘broken promise’ that reconstruction actually was. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, and various government policies that seemed they should help ensure a safer and more equitable future for African Americans in the United States, a sense of hope was renewed. This led to the Great Migration, a wave of millions of African Americans leaving their homes and everything they knew in the South, to pursue better futures in cities up North, or out West, in emerging industries, such as manufacturing. At first, this shift seemed to many like it could spark a new era of black participation within American society. The ‘broken promise’ came in the fact that despite laws having changed, much of the general population still wasn’t ready to accept a mixed society between both black and white Americans.  In Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s Poem, Goin’ Back , he tells the tale of an ...
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