09/05/2023
Happy Birthday to Richard Wright on the 4th of September
“I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown….”
The man who wrote those words, channeling the dreams of the people of the Great Migration, was Richard Wright, born on this day, Sept. 4, 1908, outside Natchez, MS. The son of a sharecropper who could neither read nor write, he would become one of the most influential novelists of the 20th Century and an inspiration for The Warmth of Other Suns.
His family suffered one upheaval after another: the breakup of the marriage, the mother’s failing health as she then labored as a domestic; her sons landing for a time in an orphanage; and, the mother’s paralysis from a stroke when Richard was 10, forcing him to leave school to find work. He ran errands and sold newspapers, eventually returning to school and becoming valedictorian of his graduating class.
Throughout, Richard dreamt of escape and devoured the few books he could get hold of. In 1927, at the age of 19, he fled the Jim Crow South on the Illinois Central Railroad to feel what he called “the warmth of other suns.” In Chicago, he worked washing dishes and sweeping streets before landing a job at the post office. He began going to the library, something he could not do in his home state of Mississippi.
In 1940, he published Native Son, to national acclaim, and, in 1945, his autobiography, Black Boy, a seminal narrative of the Great Migration and of the human desire to be free.
He sought the warmth of other suns throughout his life, disheartened by the intolerance he found in the North. When he lived in Greenwich Village, barbers refused to serve him and some restaurants refused to seat him. When he bid on a house in suburban New York, the owners refused to sell to a black person. He fled to Paris with his family in the late 1940’s and died there in November 1960, at age 52.
Today, the boy who was not permitted to walk into a library in Mississippi has a branch named after him in Jackson. And near the state capitol, there stand the statues of the literary legends of Mississippi: Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and, yes, the native son who had to flee, Richard Wright.
