Richard Wright today

Richard Wright is not an icon to the movement anymore. He is fodder for cultural historians who are revisiting him on the 100th anniversary of his birth. They are writing odes to Wright and contesting the meaning of his literary legacy. Literary significance of any writer is not as important as the actual history of great masses of people moving to reconstruct society.

The shocking story of Bigger Thomas in Native Son was a big event when it was published on March 1, 1940. The story is placed in Chicago, where I lived at the time the book came out. It was a big deal in the segregated slum on the South Side. It includes a very dramatic burning of a white woman in a furnace. Bigger Thomas' fear showed how racism operated in Chicago. Hundreds would come to discussions at the Washington Park outdoor forum. Bigger Thomas, people felt, underwent a form of lynching.

As I wrote in 1980, "When Wright published Native Son, back in 1940, it was an historic break from the Black middle-class literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Bigger was the frightening spectacle of what Northern racism could do to a human being, how totally it could alienate a young Black person from American 'civilization.' And, because of Bigger's human qualities of 'perception and emotion' as Wright puts it, Bigger was implicitly the negation of that civilization."

Blacks, who were discussing the book, were stuck in the ghetto, piled up in kitchenettes, small apartments that kept getting broken up into even smaller units, crammed with people. Blacks were in these segregated slums not because they wanted to live that way, but because there was no alternative. Police brutality was widespread. One could not cross Cottage Grove Avenue without getting arrested. I myself was arrested for walking on the other side of Cottage Grove.

Racism was so horrible Wright feared for his life. He exiled himself to Paris. He left the indigenous Black struggle, which was becoming much more developed. While he coined the phrase "Black Power," which later became a slogan for the movement, he was not here to participate in it. Wright died in 1960 in Paris, but his contribution to the movement doesn't stop at a literary work.

Most of Wright's ideas about Black reality were presented in fiction form. In them he revealed an aspect of American civilization that neither the Communist Party USA, whites in general, nor the Black middle-class leaders could accept. Yet it was just here, within the main source of Wright's legacy to Black America, that he showed his unfailing determination to discover something universal by going deep into Black reality in racist America.

Wright developed a critique of American civilization through the Negro question. It was also a critique of Blacks in American civilization, especially Black leadership in the form of Black writers. In his 1937 essay, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," long before Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth about the reality, the limitations and the transformation of African Nationalism, Wright was attempting to approach American Black Nationalism in that same dialectical way.

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