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February, 1980 - New National BLACK MONITOR
The Racial Thought Os
Richard Wright
Who Used. His Poverty To Triumph, and Who Made
Black Americans RealTo White America
(Please Note: Young people are asked to
please read this story—with a dictionary
handy. That is the way that Richard Wright
helped to discipline his brilliant mind and
pull himself up from painful poverty to a
great measure of freedom and influence.)
To many of the black young people who
are now in their high school or college
years, the name of Richard Wright—the
foremost black novelist of our century —
may seem like a vague recollection from our
distant racial past.
Yet Richard Wright (who was born in
1908 and died in 1960) remains what has
been called the “most persistently contem
poraneous” and important of all the black
writers which our country has produced.
Though things have changed somewhat in a
quantitative form, the qualitative aspect of
black life as our being “less than” has not
changed significantly in many ways. Wright
made himself a permanent home in black
American history with his best known
books. Native Son and Black Boy.
In both of these books, Richard Wright
demonstrates, as brilliantly as any black
man, how poverty can and must be used
against itself. Wright would remind every
black American that “every knock is a
boost,” and every stumbling block can
become a ready-made “building block.”
He turned his scorn on welfare, and pointed
to the way by which blacks today can pull
themselves up by whatever bootstraps we
have in order to find freedom and pros
perity in spite of the seeming odds against
us.
In this short presentation of his ideas, we
shall bear in mind to a large degree our
younger audience. This is the generation
which comprises the primary focus of
Richard Wright’s concern. It is a generation
which has benefitted from a different, and
more relaxed, racial climate in America
than that in which Richard Wright found
himself and our more seasoned readers
grew up. Our presently-altered racial condi
tions in America and throughout the world
have come about, in no small degree, be
cause of the compelling drive for truth
which motivated all of Richard Wright’s
career—as one who sought for, and then
“Pulling Ourselves Up By Our Own Bootstraps” .ASeries
; \ ■-
Richard Wright, from The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre (Mor-
row, 1973).
described, life’s burning truths.
Reality
Richard Wright was born the son of
sharecroppers in the village of Roxie, Mis
sissippi, two miles east of Natchez. His
poverty was painful. Few young black
people today have the ill fortune of experi
encing the hovering sense of hopelessness
and of enduring the abiding hunger and
family degradation which he came to accept
as normal during practically all of his early
life.
But of far more burning significance were
the sordid racial realities which engulfed
and seemed for a time to consume his life.
The racial situation was all the more hor
rendous, because even its existence was
supposed to be forgotten or denied.
In his powerful and incisive Introduction
for the book Black Metropolis (written by
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton), Rich
ard Wright quotes approvingly the nine
teenth-century American philosopher Wil
liam James, where James discusses the
virtual annihilation that is caused by one’s
rejection—as black Americans were before
Wright’s time and work—as being unbe
lievably cruel.
William James writes, revealingly: “No
more fiendish punishment could be devised,
were such a thing physically possible, than
that one should be turned loose in a society
and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the
members thereof. If no one turned round
when we entered, answered when we spoke,
or minded what we did, but if every person
we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we
were non-existent things, a kind of rage and
impotent despair would ere long well up in
us, from which the crudest bodily tortures
would be a relief; for these would make us
feel that, however bad might be our plight,
we had not sunk to such a depth as to be
unworthy of attention at all.” (See The
Philosophy of William James, Modern
Library edition, page 128).
Can we, today, benefit from being realis
tic about the slights still borne upon us?
Honesty
Richard Wright amplifies what Willian
James says here by explaining that: “Then
can be, of course, no such thing as a com
plete rejection of anybody by society; for,
even in rejecting him, society must notict
him. But the American Negro has come a;
near to being the victim of a complete rejec
tion as our society has been able to work
out, for the dehumanized image of the
Negro which white Americans carry in theii
minds, the anti-Negro epithets continuously
on their lips, exclude the contemporary
Negro as truly as though we were kept in a
steel prison, and doom even those Negroe
who are as yet unborn.” (Black Metropolis,
p. XXX11I).
It may be difficult for many of our younj
people today to realize the full extent to
which blacks were looked upon and were
treated as unreal even in the 1950’s and
early 1960’5. But the situation was substan
tially worse in the years before that.. .and
even our federal government has acknowl
edged that the “present effects” of that
past discrimination remain persistently with
us today.
Wright tells of his utterly overwhelming
experience in visiting Fisk University in
Nashville, Tennessee, to give a lecture on
race relations on April 9, 1943. He had
refused invitations to speak at black col
leges and universities before. Wright him
self did not have the opportunity to go to
college. He had been brought up on a share
cropper farm and on the poverty-stricken
ghetto streets of Memphis, Tennessee and
Chicago, Illinois. All throughout his life he
had been sensitive to what he saw as the
superficial pretensions of many of the more
educated blacks whom he had observed.
Black college professors and students thus
represented to Richard Wright largely a
(Continued on page 18.)