Celebrating with Black Boy on the Centennial of Richard Wright.
Author: Arthur Edgar E. Smith
Category: Arts and Entertainment
Republish this article manually
Republish articles from Arts and Entertainment category automatically
I have for long been touched by the literary excellence of Black Boy of all Richard Wright's work which I have had a reading, teaching experience spanning well over twenty years, a period in which I have kept wondering as to what makes it such a wonderful representation of a writer and at the same time remain a lively, gripping, intriguing, and illuminating read almost throughout the pages. That this year is the Centennial of his birth which is being marked deservedly well with many literary events all over the world I thought that it could be the most needed catalyst to propel me into putting my thoughts, reflections and recollections of this ever-present Black Boy in print and to reflect the true spirit of Richard Wright which was as an internationalist.
A celebration of the life and works of Richard Wright is significant and justified for me in Sierra Leone as his works both Black Boy and Native Son are taught and studied at all levels of our educational system from secondary school level upwards and have left an indelible impression on all who have read them. I have taught Black Boy for almost ten years from the teacher training college Milton Margai, to the Institute of Library and Information where I teach librarians in training at Fourah Bay College and I and my students have agreed it is an irreplaceable gem - his style being a model for all as much as his stoicism and his unswerving pursuit of self-improvement in spite of all the forces pitted against him. But then deep down we all know Richard Wright as a man whose heart was truly close to Africa, having not only thought and written about it but also having visited it.
One of America's greatest African-American writers, Richard Wright was among the first Black writers to achieve literary fame and fortune. But this was mostly due to the superb quality of his work: his vivid descriptions of scenes, the sense of gradation in portrayal, psychological penetration of his characters at various stages of their growing up, especially so Black Boy, his capturing the traumas, pain and anxieties of growing up black in the southern states of America in the early twentieth century, and his commitment to championing the cause of blacks whereever they live, Africa or the Diaspora.
Richard Nathaniel Wright, the grandson of a slave was born and spent the first years of his life on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi in September 4 1908. His father, Nathaniel, was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother, Ella Wilson, was a well-educated school teacher. The family's extreme poverty forced them to move to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1913 when Richard was six years old. Although he spent only a few years of his life in Mississippi, those years would play a key role in two of his most recognized works: Native Son, a novel, and his autobiography, Black Boy.
Soon after moving, his father abandoned the family, leaving his mother to support them alone. His family moved to Jackson, Mississippi to live with relatives. Wright's entire life was fraught with such continual moving from one town to another ,some sudden and traumatic, staying with relatives, orphanages, cleavages with family members and teachers, fighting incessantly with bullies, white street gangs,as much as his constant fight against hunger, hypocrisy, parental neglect and the trauma of living in an household of multiple sick members and coping with the drudgery of Christian fundamentalism
So when in the spring of 1925 at the age of 15, Wright wrote his first story "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre", and it was published in Southern Register, a local black newspaper, he had little support and encouragement from his family. For his grandmother had already conscripted every one on her side against Richard's independent and creative spirit.
He had to develop a high level of motivation and daring , to go ahead. He forged notes with the signatures of whites in order to borrow books from the library for him to satisfy his unquenchable thirst for great literature
He graduated as valedictorian of his 9th grade class in May 1925, and enacted another daring defiance against authority by reading his own speech instead of the principal's. He left school a few weeks after entering High School, worked at several menial jobs in Jackson and Memphis while continuing writing and discovering the works of the masters. In 1927 he moved northwards to Chicago where he joined the communist party and wrote articles and stories for many leftist publications. He became the leader of the John Reed club which was dominated by the Communist Party. During this time, he edited Left Front and contributed to New Masses Magazines.
In 1937, he moved to New-York and began work on a Writers Project guide book to the city entitled New York Panorama, and subsequently became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker. He gained national attention for his four short stories in Uncle Tom's Children, which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship Award; the money from which allowed him to complete his first novel Native Son which subsequently became the first Book of the Month Club selection by an African American author.
He married Ellen Poplar in 1941, and had two daughters, Julia and Rachel with her.
In 1944 he broke away from the Communist Party. After moving to Paris in 1946, and becoming a French citizen in 1947, he wrote The Outsider, Savage Holiday and Black Power. His travels throughout Europe, Asia and Africa became the subject for numerous non-fictional works that he wrote. In 1949 he contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed, and his essay was published in the Atlantic Monthly.
In 1955, he visited Indonesia for the Bandung Conference. His recorded observations of it were published in his book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference.
His other works include White Man, Listen!, The Long Dream, and Eight Men; and a host of other publications.
He contracted amoebic dysentery on a visit to Africa, and over the next three years, his health deteriorated. His woes were intensified by his undergoing serious financial hardship.
He died in Paris in November, 1960, leaving an unfinished book A Father's Law which was published by his daughter, Julia., in January 2008.
Richard Wright's most significant contribution is in accurately and vividly portraying blacks to white as well as black readers. Wright is essential reading to what it means to be a Black American and equally an American of whatever ethnic background.
His eldest daughter Julia Wright a journalist who was assigned to Africa and the literary executrix of Richard Wright's estate has edited the last of his books to be published: Haiku, A Father's Law, and Black Power.
On the occasion of Richard Wright Centennial she sets the backgroun and of course the pace. Besides bringing out lost or previously unpublished editions of her late father's work Julia Wright has been giving a preliminary series of Pre-Centennial Lectures and gatherings during the course of which she gives autobiographical talks based on her own work in progress (her memoirs) wherever interest in Richard Wright was strong and leaveS her hosts free to plan their own creative tributes to her father, Richard Wright, "from Centennial Committees to Festivals to art and the creation of landmarks and encouragement of his ideas, from literacy to the unrelenting struggle against racism."
During 2006, she followed the trail of Pre-Centennial interest in him from Seattle to the University of Columbia, Missouri..... In New Orleans, she spoke on the uncanny resemblance with Katrina, of the floods portrayed in "Uncle Tom's Children" and "Eight Men"" only to speak the following week in arid Arizona on campus but also in the community. She spoke at the University of Massachusetts and a few days later was at the University of Temple and at the University of Pennsylvania , the guest of Professor Joyce Anne Joyce, one of the first outstanding Richard Wright scholars. ...
Meanwhile, Professor Jerry Ward was sparking off Richard Wright Reading Circles which became a household word throughout the South.
And women like Professor Maryemma Graham and Dr. Colia Clark traced a network of revival throughout the land.
Fom February 20 to 24 all events centered on Natchez, Richard's birthplace, The Natchez Literary and Film Festival totally dedicated to Richard Wright, was held from March 28-March 30 : with Julia speaking on the theme of Transmission and Resistance at the Conference of Black Writers at Medgar Evers College.
March 29 took the Riochard Wright Centennial celebrations to events at the Schomburg Center in Harlem hosted by the Organization of American Historians, with Howard Dodson and Professor Maryemma Graham on a panel of historians discussing : Richard Wright at 100 : looking backward and forward.
April 13th 2008 : Richard Wright day was observed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill as a day long commemoration where Julia Wright shared the keynote with her longstanding friend, Pr. Jerry Ward.
April 20th to 27th was Richard Wright Week in Philadelphia
June 19 and 20: American University of Paris,will be hosting an international seminar on Richard Wright
June 28th : a seminar on Richard Wright will be held in Hiroshima, Japan under the , sponsorship of the Japanese Black Studies Association.
September 4 to 12 2008 : Jackson Mississippi Richard Wright week will be observed at various venues
October 1st 2008 :Julia Wright will be giving the first DuBois Institute lecture in Harvard .
Other events are being planned in Jackson and Memphis,so that the celebrationwill be spilling over into 2010. 2010 being the commemoration of Richard Wright's premature death in 1960.
Through his writing Richard Wright not only captured his experiences as well as those of other blacks in the written word, but the written word became through him a weapon to be used to destroy ignorance, racism, economic violence and classicism. He challenged commonly held stereotypes and notions of inferiority, defining black people as full characters free to act upon the stage of human history as ordinary human beings.
The subjects and issues that his characters struggled with represented the worst of human experience: poverty, illiteracy, violence, race, abandonment, the fatherless child, hunger, capitalism, racism, colonialism and war.
Wright's thoughts are derived from the political and social fabric of his time reflecting contributions of great men like W.E.B. Dubois and Paul Robeson and in turn passed a legacy of social consciousness in literature and influenced the civil rights and liberation struggles of the second half of the twentieth century, including people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X .
His autobiographical novels, Black Boy published in 1945 covering his youth in the segregated South and American Hunger, which was intended as the second book of Black Boy but was published posthumously and covering his joining, membership and eventual disillusionment with the Communist Party inform many of the biographical studies of Wright's life and career as much as they would my subsequent articles that will follow this up on detailing his life and works.
Resource Box:
Keywords: richard wright, black boy, centennial, martin luther king, Sierra Leone, West Africa, DUBOIS
View Count: 236
Date Submitted: 5/29/2008
Most recent articles in
Arts and Entertainment category:
Other related articles in
Arts and Entertainment category: