By Julia Wright
“I asked my mother why we did not fight back and the fear that was in her slapped me into silence.”
“Black Boy”, chapter two.
Dear Richard Wright readers and aficionados,
On this last day of 2025 and before the clock chimes midnight, I break a six month silence since I last wrote to you bereaved as I still was by the death of my little sister Rachel and of Richard’s pioneering biographer-to-be, Dr Jerry W. Ward.
2025 was also the date of the transition of Cousin Charles Wright in Natchez , the family storyteller there and whose last interview filmed by my son, Malcolm, in his forthcoming film ” Whale Like Me” moved us so deeply. Warm hugs to Cora, Cynthia and his family.
2025 was many things including the 80th anniversary of the publication of Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” in 1945.
Although I am Richard’s elder daughter and he dedicated “Black Boy” to my late mother and to me, I almost missed marking 2025 as the 80th anniversary of “Black Boy”‘s publication. I just woke up to the fact on his birthday on September 4th … and wondered how I could have almost missed it.
Especially because there had been a big to-do about the 80th anniversary of “Native Son” …
So why the silence about “Black Boy?” Including mine?
But then I realized the whole of “Black Boy” was a book about the difficulty of breaking silence – the silence imposed by white terror and the Black silence that ensues in acquiescence to it.
The opening chapters of “Black Boy”… the evocation of the quiet house, the childish boredom, the hush hush atmosphere imposed by a sleeping authoritarian father, the whispers later imposed by the adults regarding Uncle Silas’s disappearance – a lynching that does not say its name. It is as if the silence permeating these pages is thick enough to cut with the weapon that would later become a writer’s words. In contrast, the opening chapters of “Native Son” are all noise and fury and braggado.
However once I realized “Black Boy” had turned 80 – and that the ordeal of silence my father passed through in the book was being repeated in these times of neo McCarthyism when books like “Black Boy” are silenced in turn – I became fascinated by this Russian doll effect : the present day censorship echoes the soul-destroying culture of silence the writer struggled against as he grew up.
A timeslip.
So I reached out to those I knew to be Richard Wright aficionados asking them if they would help me celebrate this anniversary in times of Black history cleansing.
The responses have literally broken the spell of silence and created around “Black Boy” a renewed family of pioneering analysis and understanding.
I was both warmed, uplifted, awed and challenged by the depth and richness of the feedback
I will quote from them in my forthcoming memoir but I want to thank them here.
My thanks go to Jennifer Civiletto, Richard’s indefatigable editor at HarperCollins, who has timed a new Olive Edition of “Black Boy” to celebrate this anniversary.
I want to thank Bryan Stevenson not only for his encouraging words but for helping me to bury Silas Hoskins – taking him from the paper grave of chapter 2 of “Black Boy” to a jar of memorial soil in his National Lynching Museum.
It is with deep gratitude that I learned that in Arkansas where great uncle Silas was lynched, Judge Wendell Grffin went on his radio show to pay tribute to “Black Boy” – and I was deeply moved to hear from Reverend Doctor Mary Olson in Elaine, AR, who likes to quote these words from chapter 2 : “I asked my mother why we did not fight back and the fear that was in her slapped me into silence.” Yes, the leitmotif of silence.
As I send this newsletter out the Elaine Legacy Center ( of which I am a member ) sent me the following exciting lines :
The public library in Elaine was closed in November and the building given to “County Christmas” – a nonprofit funded by a former bank owner who in her will left “one million dollars to an institution of higher education that did NOT educate Black people.” We were totally overlooked and not considered for keeping the library open even when we offered to fund the money needed to keep the library open as a public library. Wasn’t even done legally. But:
We can’t fix that but we can start a lending library in Elaine. Would it be ok to name it the “Richard Wright Lending Library and Research Center? (it would be under the Richard Wright Civil Rights Center but we want the library named a Richard Wright library.) We also aim to have a complete section of the library of all the books by your father or about him.
I replied YES ! In fact this news served as a balm healing the news of “Black Boy” ‘s so-called obsolescence elsewhere ( see below ).
If any of you are interested in helping to stock the Richard Wright Library in Elaine where the youth descending from the survivors of the 1919 Race Massacre will be reading and studying – please contact me.
In the same spirit, I want to thank Pr Donald Kizza-Brown for understanding that beyond the printed words, the publication of “Black Boy” in 1945 was followed by a radical praxis in the community – the free Harlem clinics to prevent what is called juvenile delinquency. Wright’s need to turn literature into action has been insufficiently highlighted by biographers.
All my gratitude goes to John Edgar Wideman for understanding that such words entailed a sacred responsibility to be written and that an ordeal was endured for having written them .
All my gratitude to Ishmael Reed who understands the tragedy of Wright’s permanence – resting on the eerie conflation of Wright’s experience of white terror and sunset towns with today’s nationwide militarization of cities both down South and up North ( I am reminded of the end of the restored edition of “The Man Who Lived Underground” [1942 ] where airplanes invade an urban US city … ).
And yes, film studies Professor, Regge Life, is right to warn us we should get a hold of the book while we still can.
In fact if it had not been for Pr Mark Taylor I would not have known that as recently as this year “Black Boy” was banned at a Long Island school under the disingenuous pretext of “obsolescence”. And Pr Greg Thomas is so right to point out that we all still suffer from the American Hunger Wright reached out to satisfy – Richard’s analysis of what constitutes American Hunger is key to understanding all his works.
Pr Joseph Ramsey brilliantly highlights the silence within silence effect when he points out that Richard had to draw on forbidden material to write a book that would end up being forbidden.
Strikingly Charlie Braxton bears testimony to the “raw passion” that explained his own coming of age as a poor, working class Black male in Mississippi.
The same Library in Memphis where Richard had to forge notes to borrow books, is not only still standing and celebrating yearly Richard Wright Awards, it sent a message reminding us that there are “Black” boys of all races.
The Hurston-Wright Foundation that celebrated Wright’s legacy at their Awards Ceremony in October has sent a strong resilient message.
Last but not least, I pay tribute to Jerry W.Ward Jr’s HarperPerennial 1993 introduction to “Black Boy”, a text that is a masterpiece in its own right letting the reader know that hunger was multidimensional for Wright – from the physical to the metaphysical, from the biological to the search for human borderless meaning:
Jerry Ward wrote of “the graphic portrait of the abused male as a young man” and he goes on to make the key point that “the book challenges our stereotypical thinking about South and North; it questions the profit of using the symbolic geographic designations loosely (…). Northern exposure [to racism] results in the self’s knowing that all I possessed were words and a dim knowledge that my country had shown me no examples of how to live a human life.” . Ward continues : “There is no hiding place in regional differences.”
As “Black Boy” turns 80 , I go to meet the hungry child who was my father and who till his last day battled with the “punishment” of breaking silence – an act too often equated with “confession” rather than with telling truth to power.
Richard wrote in 1960 of his own silence-scape:
it is September
the month in which I was born
and I have no thoughts
My own re-readings of Black Boy this year were done in a very specific context: the era of silencing that hangs over Academia and the HCBUs as well as many universities.
Even the Wall Street Journal has recently analysed the position of prestigious universities as having become “instruments of the State.”
I am reminded of Richard’s adamant refusal to read the valedictorian speech imposed on him by his white principal…an unforgettable passage of “Black Boy”.
The question being: will the Black literature re-read through the prism of such silencing strictures be scarred yet again?
Can one say there is such a notion as domestic book violence?
In closing, I want to thank Richard’s family, my family, for their contributions – my daughter Ellen-Ama for her beautiful haiku writing of which she offers me so many samples and my son Malcolm for reminding us of the importance of his grandfather’s attachment to non-alignment.
Without their presence, their patience and their wisdom I could not in turn maintain the tradition of breaking silence.
And on this birthday, through her own message I was blessed to meet Miranda the great granddaughter of Leon , Richard’s late brother.
We endure.
We continue to break silence.
(c) Julia Wright, December 31st, 2025
