Content Warning: This section of the guide features references to rape and racially-motivated violence and murder, specifically lynching.

By the time Wright wrote “Between the World and Me” at the age of 27 in 1935, he had plenty of experience with the violence that Black people in the South faced at the hands of whites. In 1916, when he was nine years old and living with his aunt Maggie Hoskins and his great-uncle Silas Hoskins, he experienced race hatred firsthand. Hoskins owned a saloon that Black workers frequented. He was shot and killed by white men who wanted to take over his prosperous liquor business. Wright recalled in his memoir, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, that the Black man who brought the news of Hoskins’s death reported that the white men had said they would kill all Hoskins’s family if they made any protest. The family was forced to flee. The killer may have been the local deputy sheriff but no one was charged with the crime. Wright recalled that some white people told Maggie that she should never say anything about the murder, and he described in Black Boy the immediate aftermath of his great-uncle’s death: