"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. At the age of six, Wright's father abandoned the family, leaving Wright and his younger brother by two years, Leon, under the sole care of his mother Ella who was a schoolteacher at the time.
Moving to Memphis, Tennessee, where Ella took a job as a cook, Wright...
