Finished reading Richard Wright's memoir BLACK BOY. Wright (1908-1960) was born in Mississippi during the Jim Crow days, a period of racial segregation, discrimination and extreme brutality against African Americans. He spent his youth in the South and then moved northward to Chicago searching for betterment. With only a few years of formal schooling, Wright read extensively and studied independently and became a writer with a social conscience. During the mid-1930s he joined the US Communist Party but quitted in disgust over the party's never ending infighting and internal witch hunting. In 1945 Wright wrote his memoir. The next year he migrated to France and lived there for the rest of his life.
For me BLACK BOY is a riveting read with its firsthand portrayal of grinding poverty and oppression in the American South during the first quarter of the 20th century.
