By Julia Wright
In the December 31st 2025 Richard News Bulletin called ” Eras of silence : Re-reading “Black Boy” at 80″, I wrote about the absence of commemoration of the 80 years of “Black Boy” likening the silence around my father’s memoir to the silence that pervades the first few chapters of his book.
The hushed tones in the home, the failure to give the children words for the horror of the lynching that took their uncle from their midst, that key question from Richard “Why did we not fight back? ” suppressed by a mother whose fear “slapped him into silence”…
I left it at that.
Then six months later, re-reading the previous Bulletin, I realized that I sent you a nostalgic Blues and that the present Bulletin would have to break the silence with the anger of spoken word.
Before he died, my father encouraged me to be a journalist.
Today as a weathered one, I have learned that an article on an event has no value unless it is grounded in timing and context.
So what is the event here ?
Next 4th of September is the 118th Birthday of Richard Wright – an event which unlike his recent birthdays will be celebrated and not silenced thanks to the Richard Wright Society. [ See details of the Celebration of his Haiku on September 4th at theTea Gardens of San Diego from 6 to 7 PM EST- information below.] *
I will open up the celebration at 6 PM EST with a few words, delighted to further break silence by letting the haiku speak for themselves – the very haiku his publishers had declined to publish in 1960 in the spirit of the McCarthyism impacting all his submissions – the pretext given was that these poems today internationally acclaimed were “too monotonous”.
My mother, Ellen Wright, published the haiku posthumously in1998 – 38 years after Richard received the rejection letter. He died four months later.
So what are the timing and context of this commemoration ?
Since I sent you the last Bulletin at least three key documents have come out, documents governing our daily lives, our daily thoughts, our creativity, the books we are influenced to read or not to read, the folks we are no longer free to associate with,..
We are to all intents and purposes in “another world”.
The first document whose full text is classified and whose guidelines can be found on the White House website is NSPM-7 that writes in stone if not in law the arbitrary criminalization of thought and group association under the name of “domestic terrorism”.
The second document is Marco Rubio’s report on “Cuba as the capital of 21st century communism” – a document re-instating de facto a second wave of the McCarthyism Richard Wright among others lived, wrote and died under.
The third document is the Guardian letter whose overt aim was to protect under the manicured umbrella of a cohort of respectable Leftwing academics the notion that American’s invasion of Iran with the strongest military in the world can be equated with the Government of Iran’s internal coercive practices even as it is under a violent siege threatening its sovereignty. The underlying aim being, many suspect, to divide the American Left and create more consensus for a war whose popularity is fast plummeting in the polls and in world opinion.
This threefold context – preceded by many red flags such as the Palantir Manifesto and the Canary Mission lists to quote only two of them – weighs heavily on how we perceive the Black, Asian and Indigenous literary and artistic landscape of which Richard Wright’s books are such an abiding part.
Just as the visible part of the iceberg can be defined by the documents mentioned above, there is the less visible part of the context that prepared the terrain for those documents to be effective.
I had mentioned in the previous Richard Wright Bulletin that “Black Boy” had been one of 14 titles to be banned at Eastport Long Island School in 2025 under the pretext of “obsolescence”.**
When pressed further on the meaning of “obsolescence”, the rightwingers on the school board explained that the copies they had seen were in too poor condition i.e. “falling apart” to be placed in the students’ hands.
In other words, those pushing for the banning needed to obfuscate the real reason for their objection to the book : that is to say, the lynching of Richard Wright’s uncle, Silas Hoskins and the horror of white terror under Jim Crow described in the book had to be seen as no longer belonging to today’s MAGA America – rather as things of the past even as Black folks are still found hanging from trees in Wright’s native Mississippi in 2026 and practically nobody writes about it.
Since the last Bulletin, I stumbled on other under-reported instances of banning or shadow-banning of Richard Wright’s works.
In Hinds County, Mississippi, the Richard Wright Library shut down since 2020 – purportedly for lack of funds like many other libraries in the State – was recently vandalized and a glass case of Richard Wright artifacts destroyed.
Here the paradox is cruelly ironic : a Native Son of Mississippi who was statistically promised to delinquency took himself up by the bootstraps , taught himself how to read and write and became one of America’s forefront writers – only to leave behind books that are now over a century after his death being vandalized by … delinquents.
Also today, Richard Wright’s publishers are challenging a book- banning law affecting Iowa’s public school libraries – which would affect nine titles among which Native Son.
This time the pretext is objectionable “sexual content”.***
We understand only too well why it is part of the white supremacist and liberal agenda to censor Richard Wright. We would not expect less of them. It goes back a long way to the 1940’s, when Theodore Bilbo, a democratic Senator from Mississippi and close to the KKK, would rant and rage on the Senate floor against Black Boy for being obscene.
However at this very time and in the aftermath of the Rubio report , the wave of attacks against Richard Wright and his works do not stop with MAGA and the white supremacists.
Recently, twice, on Due Dissidence, Russell Dobular has mentioned Richard Wright with the flippancy of dismissive disinformation.
Three weeks ago, he stated to Joel Whitney, a best-selling white specialist on CIA matters, that “Richard Wright worked for the CIA before he quit “.
On August 26th, he reiterated his disinformation adding that his daugher may be upset but facts are facts.
This stubbornness – in spite of my rebuttals in the comments section and most replies agreeing with me.-deserves close attention.
One, Richard Wright in the French exile he chose had to submit to humiliating surveillance and invasion of privacy on the part of the State Department and the CIA. He was wiretapped at home.
Thanks to the recently declassified memo written by Arthur Schlesinger on the CIA and delivered to John F. Kennedy shortly before the latter was assassinated, we now know that half of the State Department embassy staff outside the USA was CIA and in Paris it was 60%.
Every time he needed to go to the US embassy to renew his passport, Richard had to swear on his honor that he was not a communist.
In fact although he had left the CPUSA in 1942 he had remained a Marxist and his closest friends were “Uncle George” aka George Padmore, a revolutionary marxist and Pan Africanist, and Ollie Harrington who was still in the CPUSA. Richard stoutly refused to renounce those trusted friendships. The last visitor to his small apartment in Rue Regis was Langston Hugues. I was there.
Two, the McCarthyist playbook made sure that Richard Wright’s books would not sell in the US, that his royalties would plummet reducing my father to writing record sleeves for a French company, getting stipends for articles in the French press, in “Présence Africaine”, in Jean Paul Sartre’s “Les Temps Modernes” and accepting funds from the Congress For Cultural Freedom to be able to cover the Bandung Conference on Non Alignment when his US publishers got cold-war-feet and would not offer a sufficient advance. When he found out that the CCF was CIA-funded, he was furious and felt bitterly betrayed. He died with 800 dollars in the bank between the rock of McCarthyist censorship at home and the hard place of being poor rather than accept CIA funds abroad.
Three, my question is simply : while I can understand why the Right is fighting my father’s books
– why does a so-called radical part of the white Left feel comfortable joining the Right in what amounts to character assassination of a Black Red writer at a time when a second wave of McCarthyism is rearing its head ? Or maybe the answer lies in the question ?
That being said, the truth about Richard Wright will not come from Ivy league quips or ivory tower podcasts where only white “experts” are invited to pontificate about Black lives.
The truth about Richard Wright will come from the very communities he always wrote for.
From those on death row who like Bigger understood without always finding the words to say it that the only real and just death penalty was for the capitalist system that put them there in the first place.
From those on death row today like Keith LaMar who has always said that “Black Boy” has helped him survive and has created from his cell : ” Native Sons – A literacy program for at-risk-youth”.****
From the youth of Elaine, Arkansas, who three years ago collected the memorial soil where Richard’s uncle Silas Hoskins was lynched and who along with their mentor, Dr Mary Olson, write to me today bearing witness to what they, as young descendants of the survivors of the 1919 Race Massacre, want to do to bring an answer to the question young Richard was slapped into silence for asking : “Why did we not fight back “?
Please find their words below – the only words that now count.*****
Perhaps with this timing and context we can also understand better my father’s own haiku to himself on his last birthday :
It is September
The month in which I was born
And I have no thoughts
He had continued to write haiku after the rejection of his haiku manuscript and the targeting of thought under McCarthyism, the feeling of being wiped clean of one’s own thoughts is a cry that resonates in today’s AI -dominated society, a society that values thought only as long as it is approved by the state and processed by thought-hungry machines.
(c) Julia Wright August 31st 2026 All Rights Reserved
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By Omar Drissi Posted on August 4, 2025
The New York Civil Liberties Union is monitoring the Eastport-South Manor Central School District’s decision to declare 14 books obsolete, raising concerns about a hushed mass book ban.
The titles, which include Fahrenheit 451, The Bluest Eye, Inherit The Wind, Black Boy and Go Ask Alice, were unanimously declared obsolete by the school board last summer at the request of the District’s superintendent.
“When they passed the resolution last July, the board offered no explanation — they offered no justification for why they disposed of the books,” said Emma Hulse, an education counsel for NYCLU.
The resolution came in the wake of a nationwide surge in book bans. PEN America reported that, nationwide, they’d tripled in just a year from 3,362 to 10,046.
Fearing another case of censorship, an Eastport alum contacted NYCLU, and ears perked at headquarters — many of these books are targets for right-wing groups due to their thematic content.
The Bluest Eye, for example, is among the most banned books in American history due to Toni Morrison’s depiction of sexual violence. Throughout the 2023/2024 school year, it was banned at least 52 times across the nation according to PEN America.
Inherit the Wind is also a frequent target for its treatment of 1925’s Scope’s Trial.
The trial, which challenged a Tennessee state law that banned classroom discussion of evolution, presented viewpoints that undermined creationist views on human origin in favor of analyses rooted in science.
In 2013, Eastport’s high school production of the play was met with protest from community members.
With these facts in mind, the NYCLU reached out to Eastport requesting more information.
The district explained that it intended to “simply surplus those materials which were damaged and no longer in appropriate condition for use in the school.” It sent three pictures — stacks of Fahrenheit 451 and Inherit the Wind, some tearing — to prove the point.
It went on to assure that The Bluest Eye, Black Boy and Inherit The Wind would remain part of the school curriculum.
But they weren’t, not according to curricula from the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years the district provided, in which none of the three books is present.
And, according to purchase orders, the district only bought new copies of Fahrenheit 451. The other 13 books, now discarded, are absent from the list of orders. Presumably, they were not replaced.
To NYCLU, this casts doubt on the district’s claim that the obsolete designation was a matter of material condition.
In a letter sent to Eastport Superintendent Joseph Steimel and Board of Education President Jeffrey Goldhammer, NYCLU stated it “remains concerned that the district’s stated justification for declaring the books obsolete was pretextual.”
In a response, the BOE stated it would look deeper into the matter after it reconvenes in early August.
“There is the possibility that there is a really innocent explanation for all of this,” said Hulse. “One plausible alternate explanation is that they already had a lot of copies [of the obsolete titles] and they only surplused some of them. If the district can provide proof that they still have classroom sets of the books and they remain in the curriculum, we’ll be delighted to hear it.”
That said, the facts of the case resemble covert book ban practices typical in blue states, according to censorship historian Ira Wells.
“It is perfectly legitimate for libraries to get rid of books that are falling apart or outdated,” he said, describing a practice known as weeding. “But the American Library Association, is very, very clear that weeding is not a deselection tool for controversial material.”
In red states, “governments can make it very easy” to challenge books by enacting legislation. Wells gave the example of Florida: “Ron DeSantis made it easier for parents to challenge books by making libraries publish their published lists of everything that they had on their websites, see what’s there and then challenge it.”
In left-leaning states, where such legislation is unlikely, “we have seen the abuse of weeding systems,” he added.
Should the Eastport debacle be a case of book banning, it wouldn’t be out of character for Long Island, a region that’s often been at the center of such controversies.
In 1975, Nassau’s Island Trees School District removed books including Go Ask Alice and Black Boy from school library circulation. They were deemed “Anti-American, Anti-Christian, Anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.” The decision was met with backlash from an incensed group of students.
They took their school board to the Supreme Court.
In a 5-4 ruling, a plurality of justices concluded that the ban should be overturned, but they couldn’t agree on why. To some, it was a matter of free speech; to another, a case of what is and isn’t within a school’s purview.
Needless to say, the ruling is hazy and it failed to provide a concrete precedent.
More recently, in 2022, the Smithtown School District banned pride-related books from its library’s children’s section. The decision was quickly reversed following widespread backlash, including condemnation from Governor Kathy Hochul. That same year, Connetquot and Plainedge restricted access to books about gender dysphoria and racism, respectively.
The Eastport case is the first serious Long Island potential book ban case to have caught NYCLU’s attention in the past few years.
But, worried that the nationwide book banning trend may make its way to The Island and greater New York, NYCLU plans to follow the situation at Eastport closely.
An Eastport representative said the board of education was not immediately available for comment.
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Publishers File Amended Complaint In Iowa Book Banning Challenge
Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and the Authors Guild have filed an amended complaint in Penguin Random House v. Robbins, refining their challenge to Iowa SF 496, a book banning law about public school libraries. The case has been litigated since 2023.
The complaint will now challenge nine banned books: 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; Native Son by Richard Wright; Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult; The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang; Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson; and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
The suit challenges the banning on First Amendment grounds, and argues that “Iowa’s law applies only to books containing reasonably detailed descriptions of specific sex acts, meaning many books removed under SF 496 should never have been pulled from school shelves.”
Dan Novack, vp & associate general counsel at Penguin Random House, wrote in a statement on behalf of the plaintiffs, “The Eighth Circuit made clear that Iowa’s law applies far more narrowly than the State had previously argued. Our amended complaint asks the court to enforce those limits for books that should never have been removed from school shelves and establish precedent that protects works of extraordinary literary and historical value. These nine books demonstrate how SF 496—and its overzealous enforcement—has resulted in the erasure of history, depriving Iowan students of essential information, stories, and ideas. Our goal is simple: to ensure all students have access to the books they need to learn, grow, and understand the world around them.”
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When Elaine young people, all descendants of the Elaine Massacre of 1919, traveled to the Lynching Museum in Montgomery to deliver to Dr. Bryan Stevenson the “jar of soil” they collected near where Silas Hoskins was lynched; they were young elementary school students. They celebrated the efforts of Julia Wright and themselves to place Silar Hoskins name in the museum. Now they are teenagers showing the influence of their early participation in history. They read Chapter Two of Black Boy, describing Elaine as a place of bungalows and an abundance of food and they are reading the history of their own people as well as that of Richard Wright’s lynched uncle. They now challenge themselves with the question Richard Wright asked his mother in their flight from Elaine to keep from becoming the next to be lynched, “Why did we do nothing.” Today the teens ask of themselves, “Are we doing what we can locally and beyond?” A never ending question.
When news came from Elaine’s Friend Julia Wright, that the Richard Wright library near Jackson, MS was vandalized, closed for repairs that never happen, and all the books gone it was more than a distant news story. Youth want to travel to Jackson and meet with people there trying to save that library and others keeping black history alive
London Magsby, the oldest of the Elaine teens. writes to those at the Richard Wright Library near Jackson, “Please keep the library open for our history. All kids need our history even if they think they don’t. I turned 16 and am still in high school. I take two history classes I chose to take because I am willing to learn about my history and how things change from centuries to this cruel world of people.”
London’s brother, Caleb, writes, “I am sorry to hear what happened. Please keep the library open.”
As Dr. Mary Olson and James White talked with the young people they were asked, “When will our own Richard Wright Library and Research Center open?” It is being held up because the building has been donated but it sits on public school property for which the state says “it can not find a deed.” But it will open soon. The publishers have donated Richard Wright books. Another non profit has donated a truck load of African American books. It will become part of a much needed movement to protect and save libraries and centers of Black History. If there are people reading this willing to provide leadership for the movement, please email Julia Wright at imaginesisyphushappy26@gmail.com and she will let us know who you are. It’s time for concrete next steps.
