The Failures of the Civil Rights Movement: Shown in Naturalist Historical Fiction
Richard Wright’s naturalist “Down by the Riverside” demonstrates the failure of the civil rights movement and its attempts made for equal African American rights opposed to racial segregation in the South through the events of Mann and his struggle for survival during a disastrous flood. Wright takes the idea of naturalism, where essentially people are all just human sacks of meat that have to deal with the uncontrollable forces of nature, and blends that in a story set in a heavily segregated American society—he fully encapsulates Mann’s powerlessness against the raging flood, but emphasizes how Mann is even more so (faltered) by the racism integrated in the American system, simply because he is a black man. Eventually, these elements of naturalism and power dynamics show so much irony: the forces created by racial segregation in American society are on par with the oppression that a natural disaster could impose on humanity. By understanding the different effects of both nature...