SECTION F: NON - AFRICAN PROSE NATIVE SON - RICHARD WRIGHT Discuss the role of the black clergy in the Novel?

Answer Details

In Richard Wright's Native Son, the black clergy, embodied chiefly in Reverend Hammond and the church-going piety of Bigger's mother, play a role that is finally critical rather than consoling. Wright uses religion to expose what he sees as its failure to meet the real needs of oppressed black people in a racist society.

Religion as the refuge of the oppressed. The black church offers comfort and endurance to a suffering community. Bigger's mother turns to hymns and prayer to bear the hardship of poverty and racism, and Reverend Hammond represents the spiritual authority to which such people look for hope. To many characters, faith is the one solace in a hostile world.

Reverend Hammond and the appeal to Bigger. After Bigger's arrest, Reverend Hammond visits him in his cell, urging repentance and offering the consolation of the Christian faith. He presses a cross upon Bigger and calls him to submit and to look for redemption in the world to come. His concern is genuine, and he speaks for the traditional otherworldly response to injustice.

Bigger's rejection of religion. Bigger, however, cannot accept this comfort. To him it offers only passivity and escape, a promise of reward after death that does nothing to change the wall of oppression that has shaped his life. The cross becomes tangled in his mind with the burning cross of the white mob, and he thrusts the clergyman's faith aside.

Wright's critique. Through the clergy Wright dramatises his view that religion, as practised, functions as an opiate. It teaches the black community to accept suffering and to wait for heaven instead of confronting the social conditions that crush them. The clergy, however sincere, cannot deliver Bigger because they address the soul while ignoring the system.

In conclusion, the black clergy in Native Son represent the consoling but ultimately inadequate response of religion to racial oppression. Wright uses them, and Bigger's rejection of them, to argue that spiritual comfort alone cannot answer the injustices that produce a Bigger Thomas.