The Civil Rights Movement and Down By the Riverside by Connor G

  One big piece of the story Down by the Riverside by Richard Wright was the idea of the protest novel. His story highlights the struggles that black people had to endure in the post-slavery south, in the midst of Jim Crow laws. As mentioned above, this writing is a protest novel, and clearly so with all the tragedy and misfortune that befalls the main character, Mann, as a result of said Jim Crow laws. While the whole story could be considered as a novel written to oppose the prevalent racial segregation in the south, many passages offer a summary of the attitudes of Black Americans at the time. 

One passage that speaks to the movement for equal rights in Down by the Riverside is when Mann is forced to work the levee during the flood, even after his wife was pronounced dead. “Well, you don't have to go to the hills. Your folks'll go on to the hills and you can stay here and help on the levee…” Capm, please! Ahm tired!” “This is martial law,” said the colonel, turning to the white soldier. No matter the pleading or begging, he was still forced to endure the storm and desperately pile sandbags in order to prevent the levee from bursting, which turned out to be a futile effort. Mann desperately tries to resist, but he is forced to work the levee. The protest for equal rights was not the resisting of the action, but showing the horribleness of the action to promote change, rather than begging for it. Because Mann had to endure these hardships, for no reason other than the color of his skin, it is clear that this segregation must be stopped, as it is immoral and evil. That is the nature of the protest in this passage, and the rest of the novel.  

In lew of the ever rising water, Mann is forced to help the people escape from the hospital by a man referred to as the colonel. He axes down a hole in the roof, and coaxes people safely to boats on either side. After he is done, the colonel tells him “You did well! I won’t forget you! If you get out of this, come and see me, you hear?” In a cruel twist of irony, he does indeed make it out and find the colonel, under very bad circumstances before his execution by white soldiers. The colonel didn’t forget what he did, saying “he was at the hospital”, but made no attempt to negotiate with the crazed soldiers. In a way, his deeds were forgotten, he was given no trial, the verdict was already made. This idea of the story speaks to the injustice that black Americans faced during this time. As the reader, we know that Mann helped save countless lives, we know that Mann killed a Heartfield in self-defense, and we know that he didn’t steal the boat. That doesn’t matter at all to the soldiers, who were so bent on killing Mann that they didn’t listen to any reason. It paints a picture of Mann as a tragic character that fell to white supremacy, and shows the usefulness of the CRM.

Another passage that highlights this fact comes at the very end, when he is being chased through the forest by white soldiers, with the goal to execute him for stealing a boat and killing a white man. “His fear subsided into a cold numbness. Yes, now! Yes, through the trees? Right thu them trees! Gawd! They were going to kill him. Yes, now, he would die!” At this point in the book, he has accepted the fact that he would die. He was overcome by the system of white supremacy. The soldiers are a literal representation of that fact, one by being white, and two, by carrying guns, machines of death, to carry out the brutality of white supremacy. The fact that they are soldiers shows the cold authoritarian position that they hold over Mann and the rest of the black community. Mann makes a final “choice” , a choice to go out on his own terms to run through the woods instead of lay there and die. This choice is practically meaningless, as he would die no matter what, but the act of protesting his death speaks to the civil rights movement, speaking for the abolition of these crimes. His destiny was to die, being subservient to a system that hates him. This passage speaks to the larger point that the story makes about showing the depth that it affects Black Americans. This passage, and countless others show how truly evil white supremacy is, and advocates for its destruction. 

The civil rights movement employed very similar strategies under Martin Luther King Jr. They too did not fight back, but protested peacefully, and let these people beat on them, and hurt them to show the evils of what they face in everyday life. While Mann did not purposefully protest white supremacy, in his actions of surviving and saving his family, he was faced with the brunt of white supremacy. In a way, it is a very powerful way of showing how the human act of preserving oneself and your family is met with backlash and murder from a corrupt, racist system.