Black Boy Essay

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often leads to physical violence. Richard’s life was invariably surrounded by racial tension and had often seen as well as experienced the hate violence. When Richard had once worked at a cheap clothing store in Jackson, he had seen the boss and his son drag a poor black women into the back alley and had beat and whipped her. "The floor was bloody, strewn with wisps of hair and clothing. My face must have reflected my shock, for the boss slapped me reassuringly on the back. ‘Boy that’s what we do to niggers when they don’t pay their bills."(Pg. 213) For Richard the violence was just another experience that separated him from the whites and increased the hate tension. Whites were prejudice to keep other people down, to prevent them from bettering themselves, and often time’s violence was used to do so. When Richard got the job at the optical company he had expected to learn the trade, as Mr. Crane had said. Richard worked under the supervision of Pease and Reynolds, and ...

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him having sex with a white prostitute. "Inside of me my world crashed and my body felt heavy. Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the south. I had had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the death of a man I knew." "What I had heard altered the look of the world, induced in me a temporary paralysis of will and impulse."(Pg. 203) Richard’s secludedness made Bob’s death much more tragic and difficult to accept. The idea of white people killing a black person for that ...

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