From New Chicago Renaissance from Wright to Fair Modern and Postmodern Eden: Richard Wright

Abstract

Actually, both Richard Wright and Lorraine Hansberry sought to invent a New Chicago language encapsulating the repressed rage of the African American working class and therefore the disempowered people, particularly of African descent, in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Wright, who was born on September 4, 1908, on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, twenty-two miles east of Natchez, was Lorraine Hansberry’s senior by twenty-two years, Ronald L. Fair’s by twenty-four, and Gwendolyn Brook’s by only nine. Eventually all would voice several individuated angles on the city. All would recognize the human promise that needed to awaken new dreams and resources that, once dismissed as public refuse, would need to be reclaimed. All would reach for a revolutionary language to depict a city that had either broken or tried to smash the spirits of its black citizens.

The dreary stretches of Chicago passed before his window; it was dim, dead, dumb, sleeping city wrapped in a dream, a dream born of his frozen impulses. Could he awaken this world from its sleep? He recalled that pale of steaming garbage, the refuse the world had rejected; and he had rejected himself and was bowed, like that heap of garbage, under the weight of endurance and time.

—Richard Wright, The Outsider

The young radical Lorraine Hansberry considered Cross Damon to be “the symbol of Wright’s new philosophy the glorification of—nothingness.”

Indeed, in a moment of ideological correctness, Hansberry accused The Outsider of being “a propaganda piece for the enemies of the Negro people, of working people and of peace and Wright of having become a writer who negated the reality of the black struggle for freedom.”

—Jerry W. Ward, Jr., “Everybody’s Protest Novel: The Era of Richard Wright,” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel