Black Boy Sepaurin Sparknotes

Often times, it is said that we are the people we are because of the family and community we come from. In Black Boy, the author Richard Wright shares his experiences of his coming of age starting from innocence during 1912 to 1927 and starts of in Jackson, Mississippi and then moves onto Memphis, Tennessee. They were living the Jim Crow South which consisted of discrimination, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan roaming free in the streets. In Separate pasts , the author Melton A. McLaurin shares his boyhood experiences during the 1950s, in Wade, North Carolina. This was a time in the rural South where whites and blacks lived and worked within each other shadows but segregation existed unchallenged. The respective experiences of an African-American child and a White teenager living during the segregated South show one can shape their own beliefs, values and ideas despite of their own family and community.
Although Richard comes from a very religious family and a
In an occasion, McLaurin mentions to a group of his grandfather's friends that he had learned something from Street and they responded “Boy, don't you know that nigger's crazy?” (McLaurin, 51). The white community portrayed Street as crazy, first of all because he was black, then because he had an unsteady job, was a Jehovah's Witness, and lived in a cave-like home that he built for himself. However, through the many conversations McLaurin had with Street, he came to the realization that Street was not crazy, he had more ambition than any of his grandfather's friends, he also thought and knew more. In contrast to the white community, McLaurin saw Street as a smart, highly self-educated man working as a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses. McLaurin disposed the white community idea that whites were the intellectual superiors of blacks. He even started seeing blacks as