One of the major recurring symbols in “Sonny’s Blues” is darkness. The narrator uses darkness to obliquely describe the struggles that he and other Black people live through, especially those owing to being born into a life of racism and poverty. The use of darkness as a metaphor illustrates how racism takes a psychological toll on its victims. The first mention of darkness comes toward the beginning of the story, as the narrator looks at his students:

All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone (18).

When the narrator refers to darkness, he principally means the first sense described in this passage—“the darkness of their lives” (18). Though the narrator does not explicitly state what this darkness is, he implies that the darkness stems from the continual suffering caused by systemic racism in the United States. “Sonny’s Blues” was written in the first years of the civil rights movement, when Jim Crow laws and other forms of institutional racism kept most Black people caught in a life of poverty and hardship with little opportunity to escape.