This story is set in the early- or mid-20th-century Southern United States. During that period, the South was under the Jim Crow laws, local legislation that lasted from the end of the Reconstruction Era and the abolition of slavery to the 1950s and the development of the Civil Rights Movement. Jim Crow laws established racial segregation and disenfranchised African Americans in the South. Black people had limited political and working rights and experienced violence and discrimination in all aspects of social life. The activities of extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which included murders, massacres, arson, lynchings, and rape, characterized the state of racial relations at the time. Alongside physical violence, Black Americans were not able to vote and endured housing discrimination, segregation, lower wages (or no wages), and employment discrimination. In “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” racist oppression and violence define the circumstances of the protagonist, a plantation worker who is struggling to form an individual identity.

Many scholars have examined the dynamics of gender and race during the Jim Crow era. Black manhood was politicized and measured against standards of white masculinity, which was considered the norm. Jim Crow expectations of Black masculinity were fraught and often contradictory; professor Marlon B.