The Man Who Was Almost a Man

This story is set in the early- or mid-20th-century Southern United States. During that period, the South was under the Jim Crow laws, local legislation that lasted from the end of the Reconstruction Era and the abolition of slavery to the 1950s and the development of the Civil Rights Movement. Jim Crow laws established racial segregation and disenfranchised African Americans in the South. Black people had limited political and working rights and experienced violence and discrimination in all aspects of social life. The activities of extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which included murders, massacres, arson, lynchings, and rape, characterized the state of racial relations at the time. Alongside physical violence, Black Americans were not able to vote and endured housing discrimination, segregation, lower wages (or no wages), and employment discrimination. In “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” racist oppression and violence define the circumstances of the protagonist, a plantation worker who is struggling to form an individual identity.

Many scholars have examined the dynamics of gender and race during the Jim Crow era. Black manhood was politicized and measured against standards of white masculinity, which was considered the norm. Jim Crow expectations of Black masculinity were fraught and often contradictory; professor Marlon B. Ross writes that it “insists on black men’s natural deficiency as men, it necessarily also demands that they adhere to and aspire to the social codes established for the conduct of men” (Ross, Marlon B. Manning The Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era. New York University Press, 2004). At the same time, racist stereotypes coded Black masculinity as violent and animalistic. Interactions between white women and Black men frequently resulted in lynchings, and in cases like Emmet Till’s, false accusations against Black men were reason enough for murder. This danger is addressed in many of Richard Wright’s works, such as the short story “Big Boy Leaves Home.” Black men in the Jim Crow South walked a tightrope between maintaining their masculine identities without being perceived as threats.

These contradictions around Black manhood characterize Dave’s inner struggles. As a young Black man, he experiences racial oppression and the imposition of specific social standards of manhood. As Dave is reaching adulthood, he constantly feels his masculinity being undermined and strives for a male identity. His final escape on the train is a quest for freedom, alluding to the historical Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities to escape legitimized racism. Early civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells publicized racial violence and advocated against inequality and segregation, paving the way for the end of Jim Crow and the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and the 1960s.