Richard Wright – Native Son

Discussion Question 1:

Why does Bigger feel like “something awful's going to happen to” him? (23)

Discussion Question 2:

Who are the “Reds” Peggy Dalton spends some of her free time with? (58)

Fact:

Richard Wright was a committed communist, even though he had had some bad experiences connected to different members of the communist party in the United States.

(http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/r_wright/wright_life.htm). 

Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/CPUSA_logo.svg

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States, and was established in 1919. Until the 1950s, the CPUSA was the largest and most influential communist party in the United States. It played a prominent role in the U.S. labor movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, having a major hand in founding most of the country's first industrial unions while also becoming known for opposing racism and fighting for integration in workplaces and communities during the height of the Jim Crow period of U.S. racial segregation. But the CPUSA's early successes did not last. The second Red Scare, which denotes the promotion of fear of national and foreign communists influencing society and infiltrating the federal government used by anti-leftist proponents (this is depicted by Wright, when he describes how the police and the newspapers react to the involevement of members of the communist party in the case) , and the adversities of the continued Cold War mentality, steadily weakened the Communist Party's internal structure and confidence. CPUSA's close adherence to the political positions of the Soviet Union enabled anti-communist critics to constantly present the party as not only a threatening, subversive domestic entity, but also as a "foreign" agent fundamentally alien to the "American way of life". Internal and external crises swirled together, to the point where members who did not end up in prison for party activities tended either to disappear quietly from its ranks or to adopt more moderate political positions at odds with the CPUSA's party line.