Adapted by Nambi E. Kelley
Directed by ILesa Duncan
Lifeline Theatre
Native Son
Native Son (1940)
by Richard Wright
“‘The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,’ Irving Howe once wrote, and the remark has been quoted many times. What Howe meant was that after Native Son it was no longer possible to pretend that the history of racial oppression was a legacy from which we could emerge without suffering an enduring penalty. White Americans had attempted to dehumanize black Americans, and everyone carried the scars; it would take more than calling America “the Land of the Free” and really meaning it to make the country whole. If this is what, more than fifty years ago, Wright intended to say in Native Son, he isn’t wrong yet.” - Louis Menand
“the artist must bow to the monster of his imagination”
Best-selling author, social critic and influential literary figure Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, to Nathan Wright and Ella Wilson, both children of slaves, on a plantation near Roxie, Mississippi. His father was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother was a schoolteacher. Finding farm life unprofitable, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Wright encountered violence, racism and eventual poverty when his father abandoned the family.
After his mother fell ill in 1915, Wright and his brother were sent to an orphanage, then back to Mississippi to live with their grandparents. Wright felt isolated as a non-religious member of the strict Seventh Day Adventist household. He published his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre,” in 1924 in The Southern Register and held a series of jobs before moving to Chicago in 1927.
As part of the new black urban intelligentsia evolving in northern cities like Chicago and New York, Wright became a critic of the black urban experience and in 1932 joined the Communist Party. He was influenced by University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Horace Cayton, Jr., who portrayed black urban spaces as ghettoes mired in poverty. Like most migrants to the north, the life Wright experienced did not live up to his expectations. He began to see conflicts within the Communist philosophy, and eventually abandoned his affiliation. In 1937, he moved to New York City, where he won federal funding as a writer through the Works Progress Administration. Three years later, he published his most popular novel, Native Son (1940).
Native Son became an instant best seller with more than 250,000 copies sold within three weeks of its release. It was the first book by a black writer to be endorsed by the Book-of-the-Month Club, reaching an even wider audience. Native Son remains one of the most influential novels of the 20th Century. In Native Son Wright uses the story of Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old black migrant, to illustrate the poverty, hopelessness and alienation of the black residents in Chicago’s South Side. His was the first of the genre of “ghetto realism” novels that remain popular today.
In addition to his early alignment with Communism, Wright went through several philosophical phases in his literary career, like his existential novel The Outsider (1953), and his anti-colonialist essays in White Man, Listen! (1957). Despite his major and often abrupt political and sociological shifts, he consistently promoted black culture and black protest that he saw emerging in urban life. His writings, including his acclaimed autobiographical Black Boy (1945), in many ways presaged the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1941, Wright married Ellen Poplar after an earlier failed marriage, and they had two daughters. He moved his family to Paris in 1946, stating his reasons in a poem titled “I Choose Exile” (1950). In Paris, it seemed to Wright that for the first time in his life he could be both a writer and a black man.
Richard Wright was one of the first African American writers to achieve literary fame and fortune in the U.S. He died in Paris on November 28, 1960 as one of the most influential African-American writers of the 20th century.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/wright-richard-1908-1960/
Richard Wright
Nambi E. Kelly
The world premiere of Native Son was presented to critical acclaim at Court Theatre, received nominations for 5 Jeff Awards including winning production of the year, and was the highest grossing straight play produced in Court Theatre's history. Native Son is also on the Kilroy's List 2015, in the top 7 % of new plays by female and trans* authors nominated by literary managers, directors, and other artists polled across the country.
Notes from the Playwright:
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Notes from the Playwright: 〰️
This is from the actor packet from the world premiere of the show:
THEME: The adaptation is an exploration of the concept of double consciousness as it relates to the concept of FLIGHT, or one's ability to fly or be free
There are two Biggers, public Bigger and private Bigger, two views of the same man. Public Bigger is the Bigger that every-one sees, that people talk to, talk about. The private Bigger is the unseen man, the man within, Bigger's consciousness, his secret thoughts, the voice inside Bigger's head. At times, Bigger's inner-self voices Bigger's thoughts as he acts, or speaks directly to Bigger, but Bigger never sees or looks at him, (because one cannot look at the voice he is talking to). The only exceptions to that are two moments where Bigger looks into a mirror and is able to see his consciousness. Because his view of himself is distorted through the eyes of those who look at him with contempt and pity (DuBois),the reflections he sees in the mirror is that of a Black Rat, much like the rat he kills at the top of the novel. He sees himself in the rat, someone who is dirty, disgusting, vile, sought after to be killed, undeserving of life.
Although Bigger internalizes himself in a negative way (as a dirty, vile black rat), Bigger's consciousness (the character of the Black Rat) is not negative. The idea of double consciousness, as I understand it, is an internal mechanism that helps us to navigate, survive, and understand our duality as an African and as an American. The Black Rat's own duality is that he is viewed as a rat, but his intention is to help Bigger survive because he is the voice within that always tries to tell us the best thing to do. (which sometimes is not the best thing to do)He is not the devil on the shoul-der. In a sense, he is Bigger's higher self. But because Bigger does not understand his own greatness, he is blind to this.
Native Son (1951) - Jan Erlone Pronunciation at 23:18
Timelines in Native Son
Book:
The timeline spans three books: Fear, Flight, Fate. These books move in chronological time order
Fear: Starts with Bigger in his home with his family and ends with Bigger going home after burning Mary’s body. Time:
Flight: Begins with Bessie suspecting Bigger of something and ends with Bigger being caught by the police.
Fate: Begins with Bigger in jail and ends with his conviction and execution
Play:
Told in flashbacks.
Biggerlogue- present Scene 33 - Day Two - Continuation of Scene 30
Scene 1 - 2 a.m. The DALTON’s. - Day Two Scene 34 - Day Two - After Scene 31
Scene 2 - 9AM. The previous morning. - Day one Scene 35 - Day Two - After Scene 26 and 31
Scene 3 - later that day - with friends at the pool hall - Day one Scene 36 - Day Two - Continuation of 35
Scene 4 - later that day - with friends at the movies - Day one Scene 37 - Day Two - Mr. Brittan and Jan
Scene 5 - later that day - meeting the Dalton’s - Day one Scene 38 - Day Two - Continuation of 36
Scene 6 - Day One - Bigger with his family before the Daltons- Day One Scene 39 - Day Two - Continuation of 37
Scene 7 - Day One meeting with the Dalton’s Scene 40 - Day Two - Continuation of 39
Scene 8 - Day One during the time span of scene 3 and 4 Scene 41 - Day Two - Continuation of 40
Scene 9 - Day One - around the time of Scene 6 Scene 42
Scene 10 - During Day One meeting with the Dalton’s Scene 43
Scene 11 - During Day One - Earlier with his friends Scene 44
Scene 12- During Day One - during orientation for work with the Dalton’s Scene 45
Scene 13 - During Day One - around the time of scene 3 Scene 46
Scene 14 - During Day One - Continuation of Scene 12 Scene 47
Scene 15 - Day One - Movie Theatre around Scene 4 Scene 48
Scene 16 - Day One - Continuation of scene 12 & 14
Scene 17 - Day One - At the Movies
Scene 18 - Day One - After the Movies
Scene 19 - Day One - After Orientation with the Dalton’s
Scene 20 - Day One - After Scene 18
Scene 21 - Day One - After Scene 19
Scene 22 - Day One - After Scene 20
Scene 23 - Day One - After Scene 21
Scene 24 - Day One - After Scene 22
Scene 25 - Day One - After Scene 23
Scene 26 - Day Two - After Scene 1
Scene 27 - Day One - After Scene 25
Scene 28 - Day Two - After Scene 26 - after Mary’s murder
Scene 29 - Day Two - when Bigger returns to work
Scene 30 - Day Two - After Scene 29
Scene 31 - Day Two - After work
Scene 32 - Day Two - After scene 30
Learn More
The Great Migration
The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s. The driving force behind the mass movement was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow.
The Great Migration is often broken into two phases, coinciding with the participation and effects of the United States in both World Wars. The First Great Migration (1910-1940) had Black southerners relocate to northern and midwestern cities including: New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. When the war effort ramped up in 1917, more able bodied men were sent off to Europe to fight leaving their industrial jobs vacant. The labor supply was further strained with a decline in immigration from Europe and standing bans on peoples of color from other parts of the world. All of this afforded the opportunity for the Black population to be the labor supply in non-agricultural industries.
Although the migrants found better jobs and fled the South entrenched in Jim Crow, many African Americans faced injustices and difficulties after migrating. The Red Summer of 1919 was rooted in tensions and prejudice that arose from white people having to adjust to the demographic changes in their local communities. From World War I until World War II, it is estimated that about 2 million Black people left the South for other parts of the country.
Double Consciousness
Double-consciousness is a concept in social philosophy referring, originally, to a source of inward “twoness” putatively experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression and disvaluation in a white-dominated society.
Du Bois was engaged throughout his long career in the attempt to understand both the socio-historic conditions facing “Black folk” in the American twentieth century, and the impacts of those conditions on the consciousness and “inner world” of the human beings subject to them. In Souls of Black Folk that second concern was with capturing in words “the strange meaning of being black”, with describing the “spiritual world” and the “spiritual strivings” of “the American Negro”. Du Bois continued to articulate responses to these concerns in his later works: one finds formulations addressing them even in his posthumously published Autobiography (1968). As the contexts of Du Bois’s writing, research, and activism changed, these responses shifted in focus, emphasis, and perspective. Broadly speaking, as his reflections on what he initially termed the “spiritual world” of Black folk came to be more richly filled out in the variety and extent of its details, Du Bois’s account of the phenomena he originally identified with the term “double-consciousness” both overflowed the initial associations of that term and became stratified under pressure from his shifts in perspective. In what follows, we trace the fate of Du Bois’s 1903 account in his later work and then assess the reconstructed account on its own terms.
The Communist Party
The Communist Party USA was founded in 1919, three years after the Russian Revolution. It started as a dual organization composed of foreign-language and native-born American groups, but the factions were ordered to merge by the Soviet Union, which helped fund the Communist Party USA. The Communists were active in promoting civil rights and racial equality for blacks. Many black writers and artists were invited to Moscow as guests of the state. When the Great Depression occurred, many Communists believed that Marx's prediction of the inevitable collapse of capitalism was coming true. The Communists became extremely active on the civil-rights front, and they found a great opportunity to act on the national stage in 1931. Nine black youths traveling on a freight train in Alabama were arrested, falsely charged with raping two white women who were also on the train. The youths were quickly tried, and all but one were sentenced to death. The Communists intervened with a two-fold strategy: They hired first-rate legal talent to appeal the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and they also staged mass demonstrations in the United States to rally public support for their campaign to free the youths. The strategy worked. The Supreme Court overturned the first trial and ordered a new one…
At the same time as the Communists were fighting the Scottsboro case, they were also organizing sharecroppers and tenant farmers in Alabama. Their goal was to force landlords to give sharecroppers and tenant farmers a fair share of their income, provide food and clothing during the winter, and pay them money that was lawfully due them.
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Chicago's 'Black Belt'
African Americans were primarily limited to an area of Chicago known as the “Black Belt,” which was located between 12th and 79th streets and Wentworth and Cottage Grove avenues. Approximately 60,000 blacks had moved from the South to Chicago during 1940-44 in search of jobs.
In an effort to keep the newly arriving African Americans out of their neighborhoods, whites within a residential block formed “restrictive covenants,” legally binding contracts that specified a house’s owner could not rent or sell to black people. Such covenants, by restricting African Americans to the Black Belt, increased overcrowding within this area during the war.
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Prison Conditions
Before the 1950s, prison conditions were grim. Inmates were regularly caged and chained, often in places like cellars and closets. They were also often left naked and physical abuse was common. Mentally ill inmates were held in the general population with no treatments available to them. While the creation of mental asylums was brought about in the 1800s, they were far from a quick fix, and conditions for inmates in general did not improve for decades.
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Incarceration
Between 1925 and 1939 the number of sentenced prisoners grew by 88,000, an average annual rate of 4.9%, substantially higher than for the entire 1925-85 period even though there was virtually no growth during the depth of the Depression 1932-34. By 1939 the incarceration rate had reached 137 per 100,000, a level it was not to reach again for 41 years.
Chicago’s ‘Black Belt’ Through Images (1941)
Racism in the U.S. since 1619
Racism in the U.S. since 1619
1619: Slavery Comes to North America
The existence of enslaved Africans in North America is documented long before August 1619; however, this is a landmark date in the system that slavery would become. The first known black enslaved person in the United States was Juan Garrido who arrived in 1513 with Ponce de Leon on his quest to find the fountain of youth. The first documented enslaved Africans were brought by the Spanish who settled what is now St. Augustine, Florida in 1526. The enslaved Africans rebelled against their captors which ultimately led to the failure of the colony.
The first enslaved people brought to Virgina from the Kingdom of Ndongo in West Central Africa, located roughly 140 miles from the Portugese colony, Angola. After arriving at Point Comfort, they were sold to officials from the Virgina Company. In the following year, Portugesse colonizers conquered Ndongo and enslaved thousands of its people. t Luanda, Angola, the slave ship San Juan Bautista departed with 350 enslaved captives from Ndongo. Its destination was Vera Cruz, Mexico, but before it arrived it was attacked by the English privateer ships White Lion and Treasurer. The English ships stole around 60 of the surviving Africans and sailed for Virginia. The commercial enterprise of slavery continued to grow.
It is estimated that between the 17th and 18th centuries, nearly 8 million enslaved people were brought to the early United States. The triangle trade largely defines the economics of slavery in the colonial era. In this cyclical system, slave traders imported enslaved Africans to North American colonies. Colonists in turn exported raw goods like lumber, tobacco, and sugar to Great Britain, where those materials were transformed into the finished, luxury goods like rum and textiles that merchants sold or traded along the African coast for enslaved Africans to be sent to North American colonies. Slave traders violently captured Africans and loaded them onto slave ships, where for months these individuals endured the Middle Passage—the crossing of the Atlantic from Africa to the North American colonies or West Indies. The conditions aboard the ships were unspeakably brutal. Many did not survive the journey.
Reconstruction
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Reconstruction 〰️
Reconstruction (1865-1877), the turbulent era following the Civil War, was the effort to reintegrate Southern states from the Confederacy and 4 million newly-freed people into the United States. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson in 1865 and 1866, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive “Black Codes” to control the labor and behavior of former enslaved people and other African Americans. - History.com
Tens of thousands of newly freed slaves received food, clothing and medical care through the War Department’s Freedmen’s Bureau between 1865 and 1872
A Union officer representing the Freedman's Bureau stands between armed groups of Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans.
—Library of Congress
Jim Crow
Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens. Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism. Many Christian ministers and theologians taught that white people were the Chosen people, black people were cursed to be servants, and God supported racial segregation. Craniologists, eugenicists, phrenologists, and Social Darwinists, at every educational level, buttressed the belief that black people were innately intellectually and culturally inferior to white people. Pro-segregation politicians gave eloquent speeches on the great danger of integration: the mongrelization of the white race. Newspaper and magazine writers routinely referred to black people as niggers, coons, and darkies; and worse, their articles reinforced anti-black stereotypes. Even children's games portrayed black people as inferior beings (see "From Hostility to Reverence: 100 Years of African-American Imagery in Games"). All major societal institutions reflected and supported the oppression of black people.
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War officially abolished slavery, but it didn’t end discrimination against Black people—they continued to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century, Black Americans, along with many other Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades.
Black Power Movement
Black Power began as revolutionary movement in the 1960s and 1970s. It emphasized racial pride, economic empowerment, and the creation of political and cultural institutions. During this era, there was a rise in the demand for Black history courses, a greater embrace of African culture, and a spread of raw artistic expression displaying the realities of African Americans.
The term "Black Power" has various origins. Its roots can be traced to author Richard Wright’s non-fiction work Black Power, published in 1954. In 1965, the Lowndes County [Alabama] Freedom Organization (LCFO) used the slogan “Black Power for Black People” for its political candidates. The next year saw Black Power enter the mainstream. During the Meredith March against Fear in Mississippi, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Chairman Stokely Carmichael rallied marchers by chanting “we want Black Power.”
Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (BLM), international social movement, formed in the United States in 2013, dedicated to fighting racism and anti-Black violence, especially in the form of police brutality. The name Black Lives Matter signals condemnation of the unjust killings of Black people by police (Black people are far more likely to be killed by police in the United States than white people) and the demand that society value the lives and humanity of Black people as much as it values the lives and humanity of white people.
Black Joy
