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Throughout most of O'Connor's writing there is a racism factor in each novel or short story. She touches on this in every story because she has seen first hand the racism in the South as well as when the Nazis put the German Jews in concentration camps in World War II. She has lived through the most racist time period and it comes out in her writing. O'Connor lived in a time period when, "Racial segregation was a system derived from the efforts of white Americans to keep African Americans in a subordinate status by denying them equal access to public facilities and ensuring that blacks lived apart from whites. During the era of slavery, most African Americans resided in the South, mainly in rural areas" (Segregation, Freedom's Story, TeacherServe). With O'Connor living in the South it becomes evident why her writing was influenced this way. O'Connor has a number of characters with racist traits but there were three that stuck out to me. .
"The Geranium" reveals a character named Old Dudley. He is an interesting character, and from the first page we get the sense that he's quite arrogant, full of his own opinions, certain that his views are the right ones, and very racist towards colored folks. We really start to understand how racist Old Dudley is when the black neighbor moves in next door to him. Dudley is angry at the fact that this black person would have the audacity to move in next to him. O'Connor shows this in the story that because of segregation, blacks and whites couldn't live in the same area as each other. According to Living in Black and White, "History of segregation claims to be a detailed account of how cities were, for millennia, divided along racial lines" (Living in Black and White). O'Connor's writing has a message in each paragraph and the knowledge within it is pure. Old Dudley towards the end of the story when he meets his black neighbor one day on the way back up to his apartment and, in direct defiance of the way that Dudley sees the world, his next-door-neighbor treats him as an equal.
