The first time I read Richard Wright’s 1937 essay, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch,” it took my breath away. I stumbled across it while flipping through a fat volume I’d checked out of the library, The Best American Essays of the Century. When I read Wright’s words, I realized that for my entire life, I had been getting the Jim Crow era entirely wrong.

I’d always thought it was about the water fountains. That’s how it was presented in school: They made them use different water fountains! Isn’t that awful?! But to my prepubescent ears, it didn’t sound particularly awful. At that stage of my life, I was used to being told exactly which utilities were available to me and which were not. The bathrooms on the back hallway were for fifth graders. The “lounge” behind the main office was for teachers. Girls used this bathroom, boys used that one. Segregation made a certain kind of elementary-school sense. Everybody got a drink of water, didn’t they? What was the big deal? Of course, I nodded and played along—oh, yes, sitting in the back of the bus would be terrible—but I was confused, because everybody in my world knew that the cool kids loved the back of the bus. Jim Crow, apparently, whoever he was, had made Black people sit where only cool kids were allowed to sit today. That was my elementary-level understanding, and it didn’t mature very much until I got to the fourth decade of my life.

And then I read Richard Wright. And I realized that the core evil of the Jim Crow era was not the water fountains. It was the hate.

The Jim Crow world into which Wright drops his readers, through the eyes of his young Black narrator, was violent, unpredictable, and terrifying. When the “quite small” Wright and his friends got into a cinder-block-and-broken-glass battle with a gang of White children, Wright’s mother beat him until he had a fever of 102. She was trying to make him learn, trying to prevent more violence from coming to him. But avoiding violence as a young Black man in a White world proved impossible. Wright got a whiskey bottle to the face for forgetting to say “sir.” He had to watch his boss drag, kick, and beat a Black woman who could not pay her bill. He got stopped and searched by police for making deliveries for his employer in a White neighborhood after sundown.

But worse than the violence were the threats of more violence. Every brush with White rage ended with a terrifying premonition that the full measure of racialized rage had not yet been meted out. When Wright forgot to use “Mr.” in front of his White co-worker’s last name, the co-worker forced Wright to walk away from the job and never return, or “I’ll rip yo’ string gut loose with this bar!” When Wright told the story of the beaten non-bill-paying woman to his friends, they marveled “it’s a wonder they didn’t lay her when they got through.” The men who smashed the whiskey bottle to his face left him with the words, “if yuh’d said tha’ t’somebody else, you might’ve been . . . dead.” When a fellow bell-boy was castrated for sleeping with a White prostitute, the other bell-boys were told that he was “mighty, mighty lucky”; if they tried the same trick, they likely wouldn’t escape with their lives. Each time a White person lashed out violently, they followed up their violence with the threat of more.

Not once in the essay did Wright speak about how sad it was to use a different water fountain. He did long for a house with a patch of grass and a job that used some shred of his intellect. But the real horror of the lived reality of Jim Crow was not the physical circumstances themselves. It was the living, breathing terror of having to encounter, again and again, the White people who made it their life’s work to keep the Black populace stuck in those circumstances.

This is what we did not learn in my schools. We focused on the sentimental, more palatable effects of racism, those best poised to sketch the general shape without too many uncomfortable questions later at the dinner table: the hand-me-down, outdated school textbooks, the separate entrances, the back of the bus. We never looked the racists themselves in the eye. It was the people, with their astonishing capacity for violence and evil—and then, too, it was all those other White people who did not exercise violence themselves, but who had an astonishing capacity to simply keep walking—who made the Jim Crow era so unspeakably inhumane. And I never knew. I never knew.

Excerpted from Sarah L. Sanderson’s upcoming book, The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate, due out from WaterBrook on August 15, 2023.