Richard Wright was born on
September 4, 1908,
on a farm near the river town of Natchez, Mississippi. He was the
first of two sons born to Nathan Wright, an illiterate tenant farmer,
and Ella Wilson Wright, a teacher. When Richard was about five years
old, his father abandoned the family to live with another woman.
Trying to support herself and her two children—all the while trying
to keep the rambunctious Richard under control—proved too stressful
for Ella’s delicate constitution, and she suffered a stroke that
left her physically disabled for the rest of her life. His mother’s
health troubles shaped Wright’s life in two significant ways. First,
they meant that he had to work when his mother could not (which
was often); this situation made his schooling intermittent at best.
Second, it meant that Wright’s living arrangements would change
whenever his mother became too ill to care for her children. As
such shifts occurred often, Wright had little opportunity to form
coherent, nurturing, and meaningful relationships with family members
or friends.
Despite his irregular schooling, Wright became an avid
reader. When he was sixteen, he published a short story in a local
black newspaper and began to harbor ambitions to write professionally. He
faced considerable odds in this quest: his intensely religious household
discouraged “idle” thoughts and creativity, while the dehumanizing
Jim Crow South pronounced Wright and all black men unfit for anything
but the lowliest work. When he moved himself and his family to Chicago
in the late 1920s,
circumstances were hardly more encouraging. As the Great Depression
enveloped the country, Wright had to work a wide variety of stultifying
and exhausting jobs to support his family. Nevertheless, he began
to write seriously in private.
Wright entered the world of letters in 1933,
when he began publishing poetry in various leftist and revolutionary
magazines. He joined the Communist Party in 1934,
writing for their publications and meeting many other disaffected
writers, artists, and intellectuals who were also Party members.
In 1937, Wright moved to
New York and became Harlem editor of The Daily Worker, a Communist
publication. The next eight years were the most triumphant of his
life, as he published important essays such as “The Ethics of Living
Jim Crow,” acclaimed stories like “Fire and Cloud,” and two very
successful novels: Native Son (1940)
and the autobiographical Black Boy (1945).
This flurry of creative productivity did not overshadow
Wright’s political concerns, as he remained socially engaged with
activist intellectuals for the rest of his life. He left the Communist
Party in 1942 out
of disapproval at what he considered the Party’s soft stance on
wartime racial discrimination. Wright left the United States in 1947,
partly in protest against the deep flaws he discerned in American
society. Settling with his wife and daughter in Paris, he became
interested in existentialism, the philosophical movement that attempted
to understand individual existence in the context of an unfathomable
universe.
In Paris, Wright often socialized with Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir, two influential thinkers and writers of
the existentialist movement. He then began corresponding with Frantz Fanon,
the West Indian social philosopher, in the 1950s.
Wright published little of lasting value during these years, and
when he died of a heart attack in 1960,
it was clear that his writing career had peaked with Native
Son and Black Boy. Nevertheless, the sheer power
of those novels, and the thundering creativity of the years during
which he produced them, ensured that Wright would be remembered
not merely as an aspiring intellectual but as a powerful American
artist.
Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, portrays
his boyhood in the vicious Jim Crow South and his struggles with
the Communist Party in Chicago. As such, a sensitive reading of
this work depends on an understanding of its social and historical
contexts. One of the primary contexts is the body of laws referred
to as the “Jim Crow laws” after a crudely stereotypical character
in white theater designed to degrade blacks for white entertainment.
Taking their cue from the infamous “separate but equal”
ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896),
the Jim Crow laws mandated segregation of black from white not only
in physical spaces such as restaurants, trains, movie theaters,
and hospitals, but also in social arenas such as marriage. These
laws effectively created two separate societies with highly unequal
distributions of wealth. Primarily agricultural black populations
were cast into extreme poverty and despair, enabling whites to take
over the blacks’ land and further exploit them as laborers on white-owned
farms. As Wright learned when he traveled to New York, these laws
were not exclusive to the South. However, they were most devastating
in the South, likely because the South’s history of slavery made
it especially difficult for whites to accept black emancipation.
Likewise, it is difficult to fully understand Black
Boy without knowledge of American Communism in the 1930s
and 1940s. These years
saw the collapse of the stock market, industry stagnation, massive
unemployment, and even famine in some parts of the United States.
Many American intellectuals were disturbed by the capitalist mode
of production, which, in their opinion, brought about these dreadful
problems and then did very little to alleviate them. Communists
believed in the dignity and agency of precisely those people who
seemed to suffer the most. They claimed their political philosophy
was based on a scientific model, and they advanced a theory of progress
that emphasized not only equality, justice, and solidarity, but
also conformity.
As many of these tenets of Communism appealed to human beings’
noblest sentiments, the American Communist Party attracted many
idealists, including Wright. As a black man, Wright was particularly
interested in the convergence of confronting racism with Communism.
Eventually, the American Communist Party saw the same internal bickering
and division that plagued other American political organizations.
The Party’s increasingly authoritarian stance profoundly disappointed
sensitive thinkers like Wright, who had joined the Party with firm
hopes for a brighter future.
