This episode from Wright's boyhood made a powerful impression upon him because it helped him understand other people as well as himself. What did he learn about others and about himself?

I think Wright mostly learned about entrenched racism in America. The first half of the book takes place in the segregated South of the early 1900’s. The treatment of black people is brutal and dehumanizing. The author tells about the horrific treatment that he and other blacks suffer at the hands of whites. In the second half of the book he focuses on the effect of that brutal treatment on black people. Even when Negroes are able to leave the violent South with its Jim Crow laws, they have been so denied and beaten down that most seem unable to think for themselves or aspire to very much in life.