Richard Wright and the Library Card

I enjoyed reading this fictionalised slice of history, with it's lesson of sheer determination and a love of learning. It made me want to use my library card to check out Native Son.

It's Black History Month again. Things are different this year. Hope deferred has come to pass. Barack Obama is president. We have an African-American (or mixed race) president. Would Richard Wright have believed it? Not even vaguely. You see, Richard Wright (1908-1960) was too concerned with checking out a few books from the library to ponder an unlikely fairy tale. By the time Benjamin Franklin had established the first public lending library, slavery was already an institution. Slave holders understood the necessity of forbidding the world of words and ideas to slaves. Yet the battle for free lives (although without free minds) had been fought and won long before Richard Wright craved what was in books. Knowledge. Ideas. Perhaps power somewhere in the very back, the deeply hidden well of his mind. The subject of "Richard Wright and the Library Card" is one short period in Wright's life. He was 17 and heading to Chicago from Mississippi. He thought he was going to the Promised Land. But on his way, he stopped in Memphis, where he obtained a job in an optical shop. There he met a man, a Catholic who also knew prejudice, who asked him one day to pick up some books from the library. That's how Wright conceived the idea of borrowing this man's card to check out books for himself. So, a man with a father from Africa is president. Why concern ourselves with one teenager who lived a long time ago who wanted to check out some books? That is the past. It's over. Let's move on and forget all these struggles, these impossible odds that African Americans faced in the yesterdays of history. What's that? What are you saying? "We study history to prevent making the mistakes of the past." Sure, I know what Jim Crow is--laws designed by Southerners to keep blacks in near-slave constraints from 1876-1965. That's why Richard Wright could not check out a book from the public library. When he told the librarian that he was checking out books for his boss man, she was skeptical. When he said, oh shucks, missus, I can't even read, she was relieved (shame on her doubly, once as a human being and twice as a librarian!). Americans celebrate Martin L. King because he dared put on his "going to jail" suit to demonstrate and march peacefully to eliminate Jim Crow, to claim his "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," "liberty and justice." He intended to make these words fully true for "all." Richard Wright was taking those baby steps (although unbeknownst to him) on the way to making Barack Obama president. No, none of this is literally in the story, but I can read between the lines. Richard Wright wanted to check out books because he knew the knowledge and power that was in them. The first night that he had a stack of books, he read until daylight. What he read changed him. He learned that whites, too, suffered as he did--Dickens, Tolstoy, Stephen Crane, that misery and injustice are not limited to just blacks. When a reviewer considers a book, especially a

With all this obession over testing in school and phonics, researchers have repeatedly found that access to books and libraries are really the key to literacy for a people. Apparently segregationists understood this and tried to limit the accessibility of books to African-Americans in the South. William Miller's fictional account of Richard Wright's attempt to access a library and books illustrates how reading can change lives and help people to grow. Richard Wright grew into a writer and was able to use words and writing not because he learned phonics or took tests but because he had books to read.

Richard Wright grew up in the early 1930s . . . thinking that a library card was the TICKET TO FREEDOM. His mother used 'funny papers' to teach him to read but his formal education went only through 9th grade. A chance for a job took him to Memphis, Tennessee, and there he continued to yearn for books. How difficult it is now to imagine not being allowed a library card because of race. Thousands of books, but only white folks could check them out! At work Richard finally approached one white man who was willing to loan his library card. Bending the truth a bit to use the card, young Richard found a new life spread out before him. This 5 STAR story was drawn from an incident that Richard Wright wrote about in his famous 1945 autobiography. The books he read inspired his own talent. He worked with words all his life to express his beliefs in freedom and equality. Everyone MUST see the portrait of Wright on the cover of "HAIKU, This Other World" and be moved by that handsome face which reflects such great strength of character. Libraries are more than symbols, and books are treasures that never stop 'giving back'. Parents & Teachers: Encourage children to tell about their first library experiences. REVIEWER mcHAIKU believes fervently that their memories are also treasures.

Richard Wright is an African American author best known for his novel "Native Son" and his autobiographical work "Black Boy." In "Richard Wright and the Library Card" author William Miller fictionalizes a story from the latter work that tells of how Wright was inspired to become a writer. Growing up in the Mississippi of the segregated South of the 1920s, Wright was only allowed to go to school through the 9th grade. His mother had taught him to read by using the newspaper and Richard read everything he could find. At the age of 17 Wright traveled north to Memphis, where he got a job sweeping the floors and doing other jobs in the office of an optician. Wanting to check out books at the local library Wright is told he cannot do so because he is black. The only things he can read are old books and newspapers that he finds in the trash. But then, with the help of a white co-worker, Wright is able to come up with a strategy for circumventing the rules. Miller takes some liberties with Wright's original description of these events in his life, but for the most part these changes simply reinforce the elements of the story; for example, the librarian is suspicious of Richard until he lies and says that he cannot read, at which point the librarian laughs. The detail is not in "Black Boy," but certainly having the librarian laugh reinforces both the irony and the injustice of Wright have to lie in order to gain access to books to read. For that matter the language in the story is made appropriate for young readers, who do not need to hear the epithets in use at the time to understand the prejudice Wright and other African-Americans faced in the segregated South. Miller also does a nice job of setting up the anticipation of young readers who, even if they know nothing of Wright's literary accomplishments, quickly realize that he is going to be able to get to read some books and have to wonder how he is going to do it and beat the oppressive system of segregation. This volume has the advantage of wonderful impressionistic illustrations by Gregory Christie that pointedly capture the contrast between the face that young Richard shows to the suspicious white librarian, and the real face that comes alive when he is able to read books. This book is appropriate for young readers (Grades 2-5 in terms of interest level and Grades 2-3 for reading level) and emphasizes the wrongness of treating people as different in that Wright's co-worker, Jim Falk, is also considered an outside because he is Catholic, although clearly the Jim Crow laws are the implicit target of condemnation in this book. Wright considers every page of each book to be "a ticket to freedom," and when the young Richard leaves Memphis to go to Chicago and a new life, hopefully young readers will look forward to actually reading some of the important books that he wrote. But at this point the main benefit will be the sense of how things were different back then; I wonder how many young