Title:
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL SEGREGATION IN ERNEST JAMES GAINES’S A LESSON BEFORE DYING

Authors:
N’zambi-Mikoulou Donald ,Congo

Abstract:
In Ernest James Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, racial segregation between Blacks and Whites in the United States is more evident in the field of education and in prisons where schools, libraries, and jail cells are segregated because of white Americans’ opposition to their black peers’ conception of racial mixing extolled by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to quote only two. This racial segregation shows not only the inferior position occupied by Blacks before their white fellows, but also the kind of lifestyle they have to live daily on the American soil. For, the novel reads that while white schools are well built and crammed with good pedagogical materials and teachers who teach all along the school period, black ones are, however, unfashionable with teachers deprived of good teaching materials and whose teaching period is very often shortened for the simple reason that their learners have to go and work for Whites’ interests on plantations. In prisons, for example, while white prisoners are fed daily and put into jail cells with seats and toilet papers, black prisoners find theirs deprived of these important artifacts.