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Recognizing the week of April 20 through April 27, 2008 as RICHARD WRIGHT WEEK IN PHILADELPHIA.
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WHEREAS, Richard Nathaniel Wright, the grandson of a slave, was born on September 4, 1908, the son of Nathan and Ella Wilson Wright on Rucker Plantation in Roxie, Mississippi; and
WHEREAS, His family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1913, and soon after moving, his father, a former sharecropper, abandoned the family, leaving his mother to support them alone; and
WHEREAS, His family moved to Jackson, Mississippi to live with relatives, and he graduated as valedictorian of his 9th grade class in May 1925, but left school a few weeks after entering High School; and
WHEREAS, At the age of 15, Wright wrote his first story "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre", and it was published in the Southern Register, a local black newspaper; and
WHEREAS, He married Ellen Poplar in 1941, and they had two daughters, Julia and Rachel; and
WHEREAS He later moved to Chicago and became the leader of the John Reed Club which was dominated by the Communist Party; and
WHEREAS, During this time, he edited Left Front and contributed to New Masses Magazine; and
WHEREAS, In 1937, he moved to New York and began work on a Writers Project guide book to the city entitled New York Panorama, and subsequently became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker; and
WHEREAS, He gained national attention for his four short stories Uncle Tom's Children, which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship Award; and
WHEREAS, This award allowed him to complete his first novel Native Son in 1940 and was subsequently the first book of the Book of the Month Club selection by an African American author; and
WHEREAS, He is renowned for his novel, Black Boy and American Hunger, which was intended as the second book of Black Boy; and
WHEREAS, After moving to Paris in 1946, he wrote The Outsider, Savage Holiday and Black Power; and
WHEREAS, In 1949 he contributed to the anti-communist...
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