10 Amazing Facts About 'Native Son' Author Richard Wright

Celebrating Black Excellence: Richard Wright 'Words Can Be Weapons Against Injustice' Author Richard Wright was born Sept. 4, 1908, in Roxie, Mississippi. He came from a family of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South. He died Nov. 28, 1960, in Paris. He graduated from Smith Robertson Junior High School in Mississippi as valedictorian of the class of 1923. Wright would go on to write about racial discrimination and the plight of African-Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries. Wright worked as a postal worker and a hospital orderly, and he was subjected to Jim Crow laws in his jobs. Wright found a venue to escape -- he joined the Communist Party. In 1933, Wright emerged as a poet and wrote several popular poems namely I Have Seen Black Hands, We of the Streets and Red Leaves of Red Book. In 1937, Wright published an autobiographical essay titled The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, which was included in Uncle Tom's Children. In the essay, he described life growing up as a Black male in Arkansas and he also talked about the lessons he learned as a child regarding the "proper" way to act around white people in order to avoid confrontation. Uncle Tom’s Children was a collection of four essays published in 1938. Wright earned the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939 that helped him complete his novel Native Son, which was published in 1940. Wright’s Native Son was the first best-selling novel by a Black American writer. It was also the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection by an African-American writer. Native Son sold 215,000 copies within three weeks of publication. The book made Wright the wealthiest Black writer in America at that time. Black Boy, published in 1945, was an account of his childhood and youth in the South. It depicted extreme poverty and racial violence against Blacks. Wright is credited with starting the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. During the 1950s, Wright moved to Paris. While there, he worked on the book White Man, Listen! (1957). In 1953, he traveled around Africa in order to gather material for Black Power (1954). While on the continent, he witnessed the rise of the Pan-African Movement and he became involved as well.

Celebrating Black Excellence: Richard Wright

‘Words Can Be Weapons Against Injustice’

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