Robert Bone thinks that for the Wright School, literature is an emotional catharsis — a means of dispelling the inner tensions of race. "Their novels often amount to a prolonged cry of anguish and despair. Too close to their material, feeling it too intensely, these novelists lack a sense of form and of thematic line. Their style consists of brutal realism, devoid of any love, or even respect for words. Their characterisation is essentially socilo-
logical .. .... (6)

In these novels, we find a lot of violence which is used as a weapon of protest. When a black person kills a white person in these novels, it is in largely, the fulfillment of desire long repressed. An attack upon a white person or his "black representative is an attack upon a symbol of racism and oppression. Ann Petry's Lutie Johnson in The Street
bludgeons a black man to death when he tries to rape her in preparation for turning her over to the rich white Harlem gangster who employs him. But in killing that "black man, she is only killing “the white world which thrust "black people into a walled enclosure from which there was no escape." (7)

The powerful desire to retaliate in kind against the whites is supported by the firm conviction that the black grievance is just and that God approves of retaliation. In John 0. Killens’ Youngblood, a preacher says, “. . . we're going to make them pay one day soon, the one's they're responsible. There is going to be reckoning day right here in Georgia and we're going to help God to hurry it up.” (8)

If black writers were going successfully to justify violence, they had to learn the same ease of handling it that the whites had. The first black writer to make the attempt was Chester Himes. His approach to violence or protest is not explicity a moral one. In an interview, he said, "I think the only way a Negro will ever get accepted as an equal is if he kills whites (and) ... launches a violent uprising." (9)

Closest to unalleviated racial protest is Chester Himes’ novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), a novel whose

neurotic, race conscious protagonist Bob Jones makes Wright’ s Bigger Thomas seem well adjusted by comparison. This story of racial discrimination in a wartime California shipyard has a kind of political sequel in Himes’s second novel Lonely Crusade (1947) Here the protagonist, a labor organizer by profession, struggles against discrimination in the unions and exposes the wartime betrayal of the Negro by the Communist party.

Apart from Richard Wright and Chester Himes, he tone of protest is also found in Willard Savoy's novel Alien Land(1949), William Gardner Smith's Last of the Conquerors, (1948), Alden Bland’s Behold a Cry (1947) and Carl Offord’s The White Face (1943).

The emergence of the Wright School and its emphasis on protest again revived the old debate regarding the relationship between art and protest and a lot of critical ink was spilt in discussing as to whether the black literature was art or propaganda or both.

Many critics think that most black writers write with an eye to the social situation of the time in which they are writing, and have produced literature that reflects their situation as social beings existing within a particular historical framework and subject to the pressures of a social nature, resulting there from. Black writers, in the body of their work, always seem unwilling to ignore the realities of race in the American society.