Understanding the Civil Right's Movement Through Richard Wright's "Down by the Riverside"

    I believe Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside” vehemently supports the change brought by the civil rights movement, but asserts that there is still a lot that needs to be done, specifically in terms of economic and resource equality. The whole short story focuses on depicting the most vivid, gruesome, but very possible life of a Black man living in Jim Crow South during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The story doesn’t hold back on providing the reader with the pure terror and hopelessness filling the everyday life of a Black person in America. The main character, Mann, is forced to make difficult decisions to fulfill his family’s rights to basic human necessities. A really good way Wright brings about this urgency for change in the Jim Crow South is Mann’s naivety about the true extent of the pure evil of racist white people. He shows that any optimism or desire to believe things are any better than they are is just enabling the constant cycle of oppression. 

    Mann’s innocence when it comes to the lengths the southern white people will go to hate and undermine black people makes the violence of Jim Crow so much more powerful and hurtful. Mann and his family desperately need the resources used almost exclusively by white people. His innocence is shown most notably at the beginning of the story, with this internal monologue, lamenting about the horrible predicament he is in. His pregnant wife, Lulu, is in need of a doctor, but needs a boat to access the hospital due to the rising waters of the Mississippi River: “Lulu could not last much longer this way. [...] The white folks would take her in. They would have to take her in. They would not let a woman die just because she was black; they would not let a baby kill a woman. They would not.” These thoughts of optimism are later crushed throughout the story. Everywhere Mann and his family went, they were met with the highest form of discrimination. From the deprivation of essential resources, to always being referred to with condescending words such as the N-word and “boy,” to the commandeering of Mann’s boat and the separation from his family, the magnitude of sub-human treatment hits the reader hard because of Mann’s initial hopefulness for simple human kindness. The optimism is crushed innumerable times throughout the story 

    As Mann does involuntary emergency rescue labor, he is forced to save the remaining Heartfields from a flooded house (the white family that saw that Mann had their boat, leading to the death of Mr. Heartfield). He is terrified of the thought of them identifying him as Mr. Heartfields killer, and considers killing them to tie off any loose ends: “Yes, now, if he could swing that axe they would never tell on him and the black waters of the flood would cover them forever and he could tell [his partner] he had not been able to find them and the whites would never know he had killed a white man.” Mann is morally deliberating killing again for self-preservation. I argue that this hesitation reflects his prevailing naivety about the evilness of the Jim Crow South. Letting the family live, as gruesome as it may sound, was his death sentence, but I believe Mann still held on to a shred of hope that his good deeds would earn their silence, that they would understand how messed up the whole situation was, where black people have to steal boats to properly treat their already dead pregnant wife. Despite everything he had been through, he still counts on the broken, non-existent standards of racist white people. He doesn’t realize how grave his situation is until his end comes near. 

    The Heartfields report Mann to the authorities, leading to his tragic end. Wright communicates something powerful in Mann’s death. His pure belief that there was some good left in the Jim Crow South was crushed repeatedly. He did everything he could to protect his family while also appeasing the white people, only to come to a pitiful demise. I believe that Wright argues that the needs of Black people are completely incompatible with the current Jim Crow system. The story shows a virtuous, optimistic man killed as a consequence of his love for his family being at odds with the resource deprivation. Wright argues that optimism, as Mann conceives it, is impossible. He argues that change needs to come now, before more families are torn apart and more people face violence and death for trying to live passively under the oppressive society. I think that Wright believes that pragmatism is the only possible mentality that will achieve equal rights for white and black people. He believes that black people should no longer be forced or encouraged to passively live under the influence of Jim Crow. The story exemplifies this argument by directly showing how racial segregation is a system that refuses to allow black people to live a healthy, happy life, let alone flourish in any other aspect.