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Lyle, the poor white storeowner in James Baldwin Blues for Mister Charlie, who murders a young black man in the Civil Rights era South who confronts him about his racist attitudes. (Lyle will be discussed in greater depth in the following chapter.) The fascist in Richard Wright The Outsider, who refuses to let blacks live in his New York City apartment building and physically attacks the protagonist, Cross, when he learns that he is staying there. The pregnant white woman in Alice Walker first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, who would rather drown than be pulled from the water by a black man. The white man in Gwendolyn Brooks poem, "The Life of Lincoln West," who sees the little boy in a movie theater and comments loudly to his friend on what he feels is the repulsiveness of the little boy's dark skin. The whites who kill Roy in Langston Hughes story "Home" after they see him talking innocently to a white schoolteacher. (Roy's sophistication--he is a musician who has lived in Europe--is a strong factor in the whites' hostility toward him on his return to the South because he threatens their shaky illusions of superiority.) Most of the whites in Wright autobiography, Black Boy, including those who are infuriated by Wright's desire to learn about the optical business when he is working for an optical company and those who kill his Uncle Hoskins. Mrs. Auld in Frederick Douglass' The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. ( Douglass traces the transformation in this woman, who is the wife of a slave owner, from being a person who is kind to blacks to becoming a person who absorbs the prevalent attitude that blacks are inferior and should simply be subservient to whites.) Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter, wealthy New England family members, in a nineteenth-century novel written by Harriet Wilson, Our Nig, who despise the heroine, Frado, because of her race and physically abuse and mistreat her when she works as a servant for them. The little white boy in Countee Cullen poem "Incident" who, when observed by a little black boy on a train who expects a friendly greeting from him, spits out the word "nigger." The judge (among others) in W. E.B. Du Bois' story "Of the Coming of John" in The Souls of Black Folks, who is shocked and appalled that John would return from college with ideas of improving the condition of blacks, without even thinking to follow the white man's direction. Finally, and as a living illustration of many of the whites already discussed who sometimes attempt to protect their illusion of supremacy through violence, "our sick white brothers" mentioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his last speech. (The media, which endlessly played the final part of the speech in which King talked about the possibility of being killed, mostly deleted the allusion to those whites who made threats during his trip to Memphis, although the mentioning of the threats of "our sick white brothers" is what introduces the final, famous section of the speech. As a result, viewers were given an impression that King merely had prophetic premonitions of death, as if by magic, instead of the truth: he knew that his death could very well be at hand because of the attitudes and actions of "our sick white brothers.")
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