Native Son

📓 Bigger Thomas, sullen young black boy, has to die in the electric chair before he can feel alive. He has to kill before he finds a reason to live - kill the only people who had ever reached for his lost soul, a rich white girl who believed in equality and a poor black girl who accepted that there was none. He ached and fought for something in his life, but never knew the words for what he sought, and it takes a white lawyer, defending him atthe point of death from a white mob, to give him those words. 'Our future seems a living image of violence. The feeling of resentment and the longing for some kind of fulfilment and exultation stalk day by day through this land. Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?' But all this was forty years ago - an eerie, long-ago foreshadowing of a time when the names of Bobby Seale, George Jackson and Angela Davis of Watts, Newark or Soledad would ring more stridently than any Bigger Thomas in depression-rid Chicago. For no one listened then, either.