Remembering Richard Wright Novelist, poet and social crusader Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez on September 4, 1908, the son of a sharecropper and schoolteacher. Wright became a renowned African-American literary figure in the 1930s and ‘40s as he called attention to racist practices in America. “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if any echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight,” the writer said. Wr