Richard Wright's Black Boy, Alice Walker's Meridian, and Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman depict the African American struggle for rights and freedom both before, during, and after the recognized Civil Rights Era. By exploring the novels’ definitions of freedom, this work examines how these definitions inform the characters’ search for freedom. Using Wright, Walker, and Gaines to follow the freedom struggle from slavery to the post-civil rights era provides a comprehensive, historical framework for understanding the evolving rhetoric of freedom. Reflecting a “long,” complicated history of the Civil Rights Movement, these novels obscure a simplified, dichotomous understanding of the movement and provide a multivalent definition of freedom that encompasses both the political and psychological self. Ultimately, this research analyzes how these authors respond to each other and the racial and political climate of their time and examines how the search for freedom changes over time.

This study examines the African-American author Ernest Gaines's three works The Sky is Gray, In My Father's House, and A Lesson before Dying as examples of oppressed manhood, and the gradual acceptance of the characteristics of manhood in Black males. Chapter One focuses on The Sky Is Gray and follows the young hero as he makes his transition from child to a young man understanding manhood. The second chapter looks at In My Father's House, exploring the relationship between father and son. Due to his father's abandonment, the son never learns what it means to be a man. However, at the same time his son is struggling to discover his manhood, the father finally becomes a man. Finally, chapter three centers on A Lesson before Dying, showing two males can learn manhood from each other. Although both are oppressed, together they achieve the manhood that is being robbed from them.