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 and racial oppression on Mann, we see how they speak to efforts like that of the civil rights movement for equal black rights.

The irony of Wright’s naturalist approach to the devastating flood in this story is emphasized with Mann’s capability to actually resist against the forces of nature. For example, when Mann needs to travel across the entire town in order to bring his pregnant wife to the hospital, he powers through on rowboat, rowing against the current the entire night—white soldiers who he later met at the hospital even commended him for the effort, saying “Six men were drowned today trying to make it to town in rowboats. And here you come, rowing three people…” However, throughout the entirety of the story, the segregation of white and black people in American society was a force that Mann could not oppose at all. At the hospital, when Mann tries leaving town with his family, he is held back by white soldiers and ordered to go secure the levy. He even pleads with the soldiers, but they shrug him off for the reason that he shouldn’t be complaining since he’ll be with the rest of the black men. Even at the levy, Mann cannot flee on his own, because then he’d be shot by the armed soldiers supervising the working men. He has no choice or control because of the system imposed on him rather than the disaster nature has imposed on the town.

Even beyond that, Wright emphasizes the failures of the civil rights movement by having the story set in the pinnacle of disaster. In the most dire situations, the general idea nowadays would be that people would come together in order to better everyone’s chances for survival: and despite that, it seems that segregation is at an even larger scale during the flood. Black men are still used as a large workforce, and ultimately disposable tools. They’re sent to work on the levy to ensure that it doesn’t break, while white soldiers are stationed to stand guard and be ready to shoot any black men who disobey their commands. This segregation of white and black is seen towards the end of the tale as well: Mann is captured for killing Mr. Heartfield, a white man who shot at Mann because he had his boat—Mann is not given the chance to defend himself when he is apprehended. In fact, it even comes to the point where a curious white crowd sees the detained Mann, and when someone announces that he did something to a white woman, they advance forward and begin beating him. In the pinnacle of disaster, the white crowd was frenzied at the opportunity to beat the defenseless Mann because, for all they knew, he was a black man who bothered a white woman.

The irony in the story reaches this point. Everyone has to deal with the devastating force of the flood in “Down by the Riverside,” and everyone is just as susceptible to death as humans. But black people are faced with essentially another layer of disaster on top of the other—the system that oppresses them. And despite both the presence of the civil rights movement to counter this oppression and the disaster that should be unifying people in order to work for survival, black people are still oppressed by the racial segregation imposed by the American system.Finally, we circulate back to this idea of naturalism in Wright’s tale—the only force that Mann is powerless against is essentially racial oppression, and not that of the forces of nature. Any effects that efforts like the civil rights movement had were clearly absent in Wright’s story, as Mann meets his gruesome death by the racist system, and not by the natural disaster.