Making the Wright Connection
A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Virtual Summer Institute on the works of Richard Wright that took place July 11-24, 2010 at the University of Kansas.
Why Study Richard Wright?
In the February 9, 2009 issue of The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley called Black Boy (1945), an “essential American document.” Rereading it for the first times in decades renewed his appreciation for the book. That is what good literature does for us: it continues to have relevance and power. Our appreciation for it is renewed with each reading. But what makes Wright essential reading? How can we understand someone so driven by his own ambition and his desire to “fight with words,” that he could produce such provocative books that are more powerful today than when he first wrote them? “I wrote my guts into them,” Wright had said when asked about his first collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). He wanted to capture the terror of the Mississippi of his birth.
It was his second book, however, that made him a household name. “The day Native Son [1940] appeared, American culture was forever changed,” Irving Howe wrote in 1963. “It made impossible a repetition of the old lies. Wright’s novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.” Despite their direct connection to contemporary concerns about literacy, tolerance and diversity, issues central to our current national dialogue and of particular importance in our schools, Wright’s works are conspicuously absent from many curricula and inconsistently taught at best. Certainly there has been renewed interest in Wright since the beginning of the centennial celebration in 2008, but there has been no opportunity for sustained professional development. Yardley’s choice of Black Boy for his column on neglected books is telling; he believes, just as we do, that Wright’s works are “must reads.” Wright lived in a pre-Civil Rights America; he confronted its racist violence and asks his readers to do the same through his texts. He left the South to seek freedom and a better life in the North. In some ways, he found that better life, but his search remained unfinished. Wright makes a connection to us in important ways that we will explore in our Institute. Uncle Tom’s Children, Black Boy, and Native Son also lend themselves to interdisciplinary learning and are equally adaptable for the use of new technologies, one of the Institute’s goals.