Richard Wright Reader

Richard Wright Reader Richard Wright Born on a Mississippi plantation, Richard Wright (1908-1960) survived an impoverished childhood, abandonment by his father and upbringing by religiously conservative relatives; the Depression; and Communist witch-hunts in the 1950's to become one of the leading voices of Black America. His autobiographical "Native Son" and "Black Boy" influenced writers from Richard Ellison, whom he befriended, to James Baldwin, with whom he differed. Native Son 12 Million Black Voices Black Boy (P.S.) He provided moving depictions of the rural Southern blacks in "Twelve Million Black Voices" using black-and-white photographs from the WPA. Having lived through "The Great Migration" of Southern Blacks to the industrial Midwest and northeast, he understood the dilemma of relocating from the South: "We are the children of the black sharecroppers, the first born of the city tenements. We have tramped down a road three hundred years long. We have been shunted to and fro by cataclysmic social changes. We are a folk born of cultural devastation, slavery, physical suffering, unrequited longing, abrupt emancipation, migration, disillusionment, bewilderment, joblessness and insecurity." But his involvement with the U.S. Communist Party in the nineteen thirties and his self-imposed exile in Paris diminished his reputation. Even though he disavowed Communism later in life, he was guilty by association. He died in Paris in 1960, just as the Civil Rights Movement was getting underway. The "Richard Wright Reader" edited by his widow Ellen Wright and biographer Michel Fabre contains about 900 pages of his essays, poetry, criticism and fiction. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration