Overview
In 1938, a young African-American named Robert Nixon, a man born in small-town Louisiana, was executed by the electric chair in Chicago for the murder of Florence Thompson Castle, whom Nixon was convicted of killing with a brick. Even by the standards of the time, the racist outpouring that followed Nixon’s arrest was astonishing. “He is very black — almost pure Negro” read the last paragraph of the story in this newspaper on June 5, 1938. “His physical characteristics suggest an early link in the species.”
That case — and, according to interviews at the time, that specific article — provoked a brilliant young Chicago writer named Richard Wright, the son of a sharecropper, to fully forge Native Son, the 1940 story of a young black man named Bigger Thomas for whom racism, poverty and ill treatment become so imbued in his psyche as to turn his South Side existence into hell itself. Native Son is one of the most thematically crucial and formatively complex American novels of the first half of the 20th century. It sold 250,000 copies within three weeks of its publication. But, all boiled down, it’s the story of an impoverished and oppressed man trapped in the very depths of human existence and in a destiny defined and compelled by others.
Mr. Green and Mr. Wright have translated a murder story into a portrait of racial fright and hatred and given it a conclusion that brings peace to a taut, bewildered mind.
Bigger Thomas is an ignorant Black boy who hates a world that has imprisoned him with shadowy forces he does not understand. On the one side he smolders with resentment; on the other he is panicky with fright. He murders the daughter of his white employer in terror and by accident. But the murder gives him a sense of power and achievement. Now he is a man of action, fighting the enemy for his own life.
He is captured, of course, in a manhunt through Chicago’s rookeries, and his lawyer persuades him to plead guilty in the courts. At the trial, his lawyer defends him, not on the facts of the case, which are hopeless, but on the causes of Bigger’s psychological tangle. As he stands in the death cell, Bigger for the first time understands that he is a member of the human race.