Until Wright's Native Son, most black fiction was pretty much limited to historical, period pieces. Whether it belonged to the plantation tradition or the Harlem school of literature, most of it could be classed as only historically interesting. A primary reason for this is that the audience those writers addressed themselves to was middle class and "liberated" from the struggles of the poor. Since such an audience asks to read about itself, and since its spokesmen have to be "liberated" too, the writing of that time was largely restricted to a facade, a falsification of black life. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this rule Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes but as a rule, middle-class writing, black and white, was designed to entertain, not to disturb, its middle-class reader.
Therefore, when Richard leaves the South in Black Boy, it marks a turning point not only in his own life, but in the history of black literature. Much of the theme of his autobiography is summed up in his essay, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in which he describes with awful honesty the effects of the caste system on black people. No one before Wright had written of this subject as he did, and, consequently, the essay had a revolutionary value.
Wright explained how it is necessary for a people living in a society founded on free enterprise and individualism to have a background of education in one's own personal values and free access to the surrounding society. Without those qualities, and without a history of free choice, black Americans are forced to remain in close-knit, pre-individualistic groups; there, the possibility of survival is even greater than it would be if each person tried to make it on his own.
The title of Black Boy sums up the whole pre-individualistic ethic or the ethics of living Jim Crow. Obviously, Wright did not think of himself as a black boy. The very term is a social judgment, not just used by white society but inherited by the black folk in Richard's life. Richard's family saw him as bad ("black"), just as the whites did, because he expressed himself as an individual. At the same time, he was viewed as a boy, one who waited for and obeyed orders before he acted. The irony of this is that Richard quite clearly never did have a childhood, in the sense of a time free of responsibility or fears. His sensitivity to experience made him a man almost at birth. In the pre-individualistic, Jim Crow society he grew up in, Richard was considered evil and irrepressible.
