Richard Wright Born in Mississippi Delta: Future Writer's Childhood Documents Terror of Jim Crow

Richard Wright, born September 4, 1908, on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, would document in 'Black Boy' (1945) the psychological terror of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South — constant awareness of the threat of white violence, the performance of submission required for survival, the impossibility of ambition, the denial of education, and the system's crushing of human potential. His memoir became one of the most powerful first-person testimonies to what Jim Crow meant in practice for a child growing up in the 1910s.