"Words can be weapons against injustice," wrote Richard Wright. These words are evidenced by Wright's own career as a successful black writer emerging during a period of racial oppression and economic hardship. Born September 4, 1908 on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, Wright came into a family embedded in the Southern tradition. His grandfather had been a slave, and his father was an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker. When Wright was six, his father abandoned the family, leaving Wright and his four-year-old brother, Leon, under the sole care of his mother, Ella, who was a schoolteacher at the time.
After Wright's father left, Ella took the boys to live with family in various...
