November 28, 1960 – Death of Richard Wright, African American Author Who Helped Change the Perception of Race Relations in the U.S.

Richard Wright, born in 1908 in Mississippi, was an American author who wrote fiction focusing on the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries.

Wright had a traumatic childhood; his father left when Richard was six, and his mother once beat him until he was unconscious. She even put her sons in an orphanage for a time. After his mother had a stroke, Richard lived briefly with his uncle and aunt; he was twelve, and still had not yet had a single complete year of schooling. In 1915, however, he was enrolled in a private educational facility for African Americans in Memphis. Then he was moved to the home of his maternal grandmother in Jackson, Mississippi, who also beat him regularly. But he did get to attend school, where he excelled, and was named class valedictorian.

In 1925 at age 17, Wright moved on his own to Memphis, Tennessee. In 1927 his mother and brother joined him and shortly thereafter, they joined the Great Migration, when tens of thousands of blacks left the South to seek opportunities in the more economically prosperous North, moving to Chicago.

Wright formally joined the Communist Party in late 1933. In 1936, he began working with the National Negro Congress. Despite his positive relations with white Communists in Chicago, Wright was later humiliated in New York City by some white party members who rescinded an offer to find housing for him when they learned his race.

Nevertheless, Wright moved to New York in 1937, where he forged new ties with some Communist Party members. He worked on the Federal Writers’ Project guidebook to the city, “New York Panorama,” (1938), and wrote the book’s essay on Harlem. Wright became the Harlem editor of the “Daily Worker,” a Communist newspaper. He wrote more than 200 articles for the “Daily Worker” and helped edit a short-lived literary magazine “New Challenge.” Wright also developed a friendship with writer Ralph Ellison that would last for years. He was awarded the Story magazine first prize of $500 for his short story “Fire and Cloud.”

Wright gained national attention in 1938 for the collection of four short stories entitled Uncle Tom’s Children. Some of the stories dealt with lynching in the Deep South. The publication and favorable reception of Uncle Tom’s Children improved Wright’s status with the Communist party and enabled him to attain some financial stability. He was appointed to the editorial board of New Masses. By May, 1938, excellent sales had provided Wright with enough money to move to Harlem, where he began writing the novel Native Son, which was published in 1940.

Based on his collected short stories, Wright applied for and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which gave him a stipend allowing him to complete Native Son.

Native Son was selected by the Book of the Month Club as its first book by an African-American author. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas, was a person bound by the limitations that society placed on African Americans. Bigger Thomas gained his own agency and self-knowledge only by committing heinous acts.

Wright was criticized for his harsh portrait. This mixed reception, known generally by minority groups as “airing our dirty laundry,” still plagues black writers today. Historically, marginalized groups have attempted to manipulate the presentation of images about them that they fear will be used against the group. As Nathan McCall wrote in 1998 in What’s Going On:

It seems that African-American writers, who sometimes publish works that reveal unpleasant truths about black life, run as great a risk as anybody else of being charged with racial treason. For sure, if some “righteous” brothers and sisters had their way, black writers who air our dirty laundry would be taken to the chopping block and dealt with righteously. . . . In the past few decades, a number of black writers have been subjected to less extreme but more relentless attacks by African-Americans because of the notion that they violated some unwritten taboo about telling it like it is.”

But Wright also received honors for bringing the situation with blacks to the attention of a wider audience. In January 1941 Wright received the prestigious Spingarn Medal of the NAACP for noteworthy achievement. His play “Native Son” opened on Broadway in March 1941, with Orson Welles as director, to generally favorable reviews. Wright also wrote the text to accompany a volume of photographs titled Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States,, which was published in October 1941 to wide critical acclaim.

Wright’s memoir Black Boy, published in 1945, described his early life up to age 19. American Hunger, published posthumously in 1977, was originally intended by Wright as the second volume of Black Boy. It detailed Wright’s involvement with the Communist Party, which he left in 1942. Although Wright disapproved of Josef Stalin’s Great Purge in the Soviet Union, he continued to believe in radical democratic solutions to political problems.

Wright moved to Paris in 1946. He became a permanent American expatriate.

Richard Wright’s self portrait outside Normandy, France, circa 1959.

He died nearly penniless at the age of fifty-two in Paris, on November 28, 1960. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes mixed with the ashes of a copy of Black Boy.

In April 2009, Wright was featured on a U.S. postage stamp. It featured a portrait of Wright in front of snow-swept tenements on the South Side of Chicago, a scene that recalls the setting of Native Son. In 2010, Wright was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.