As a young girl, I never really knew the everyday struggles my grandmother, grandfather, mother and father went through as young kids and later as adults. You hear the stories and you think you know what they were forced to endure, but in reality, you really have no clue as to what it was like living in the Jim Crow era. Richard Wright’s “Ethics of living Jim Crow, an Autobiographical Sketch” literally takes you through the mental journey of how our ancestors were treated and what they were reduced to while living in so called “freedom”. I am going to explain how Richard Wright’s work, through his many accounts of experience, really helped me to understand the plight of our people during the most segregated and demoralizing time in our history. The first account that stood out to me is when Richard was an employee in a furniture store. He witnessed a black woman being beat into the store, and I assumed, overheard her being raped as she screamed in the back of the store. “The boss and his twenty year old son half dragged and half kicked a Negro woman into the store...”. “After a few minutes, I heard shrill screams coming from the rear of the store...”. “Later the woman came stumbling out, bleeding, crying, and holding her stomach”. That had to be a gut wrenching and helpless feeling for a black man in those times. The white man prevented our black men from protecting the precious black woman as she was violated, beaten, and reduced to an invaluable specimen not worthy of the delicacy and respect that would be given to a white woman. The second account Richard Wright shared with us was equally disturbing. The fact that a black person couldn’t even go to the library to obtain a book without the white mans permission has got to be the most evident practice of the white man wanted to keep the black race down and out. Denying education, denied us the right to have the power of knowledge on our sides, preventing us