Flashback, May 1925: Future Novelist Richard Wright in Clash Over Graduation

Being named valedictorian should have been cause for celebration for 17-year-old Richard Wright in May 1925. Instead, the insistence of his principal at Smith Robertson Junior High School in Jackson, Miss., that the youth put aside his own speech for one prepared by the school administrator triggered a threat to withdraw his diploma.

“Listen, boy, you’re going to speak to both white and colored people that night,” he was told. “What can you think of saying to them? You have no experience.”

But, in an early sign of the future novelist’s determination, Wright refused to yield.

The pressure campaign began a career in which the future African-American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist found himself in lonely opposition to white racists, religious zealots, union busters, communists, American publishers, and the U.S. State Department for what he regarded as their infringement on his freedom of thought.

What made this situation—recounted in Wright’s searing 1945 bestselling memoir, Black Boy—so painful was that the principal was a fellow African-American. It wouldn’t be the last time that he would be disappointed in members of his own race—nor the last time that he would irritate them with his independence.

Just to survive to this point in his life was a miracle. The grandchild of slaves, he was also the son of an illiterate sharecropper who deserted the family when Richard was five. The following year, Richard could commonly be found drunk, in taverns.

A stroke left his mother virtually crippled and Richard in the case of his grandmother, a strict Seventh-Day Adventist who forbade him reading anything that didn’t accord with the gospels. And, still as a preteen, he accidentally set fire to and destroying her home.

In 1921, Wright had started fifth grade in another school two years behind his age group. Spurred by a hunger for food and learning, he prevailed upon his grandmother to let him take jobs after school, which allowed him to purchase books for classes as well as food. Until he could save enough money for a bicycle, he had to walk several miles a day to and from school.

Everywhere he looked, Wright could find little to savor in a Deep South deformed by Jim Crow legislation, leaving whites cruel or indifferent and blacks despairing of a better life in the face of broken families, illiteracy, poverty, ill health, and underpinning it all, disenfranchisement. He was coming, at a young age, what his fiction would continually address: “What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?”

The one refuge he could find in all of this was reading, an activity that fed his dream of writing novels in the North:

“Where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naive imagination that possibility was too remote. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.”

A short story published with his name (but without payment) in a Jackson black weekly, the Southern Register, heightened his aspirations even as they increased his frustration with a sociopolitical order that hindered his dreams “that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.”

Seen in this light, the principal’s draft of the valedictory address posed a special dilemma for Wright: “I wanted to graduate, but I did not want to make a public speech that was not my own,” he noted.

In quick succession the principal bullied, baited, wheedled, and tempted the young man he called “a young, hot fool,” all to no avail. Attempts by Wright’s brother Leon and friends met with no better success. At last the principal relented, and Wright delivered the speech he had written—one, he admitted, not as simple and clear as the principal’s, but expressing his thoughts.

The teenager blushed, stammered and looked abashed as he addressed the audience. When the ceremony was over, he ignored the outstretched hands of well-wishers and walked home, confirmed in his thinking that, no matter how long it took—and comparatively, that turned out to be a short time—there was fundamentally nothing keeping him in Jackson.

What lay beyond Jackson? Wright didn’t know, but he was determined to find out. That fall he dropped out of Lanier High School and left Jackson, never to live there again. He took jobs in Memphis and Chicago before joining a group of Communist intellectuals in the latter city (an affiliation he would break in short order, angered by their crushing of member dissent).

By the late 1930s, Wright was gaining critical attention, but it was Native Son (1940) that finally announced him as a force in American letters. Five years later, Black Boy reached number one on the bestseller list.

Increasingly frustrated with American limits on his personal freedom, Wright emigrated to France, where he died in 1960. More than six decades after his death, the voice of protest in his mature work rings with all the clarity and urgency he was not yet able to master as an uncertain but ultimately brave teen facing an authority figure.