Richard Wright's Jackson

The Smith Robertson School on Bloom Street opened in eighteen ninety-four as Jackson's first public school for African Americans. It was built with the support of Smith Robertson, a formerly enslaved man who became a successful barber and Jackson's first Black alderman. The building that stands now is the redbrick structure completed in nineteen ten, and it houses the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center. But the detail that stops most literary visitors is smaller: Richard Wright went to school here.

Wright was born in nineteen oh eight near Natchez and moved with his family to Jackson when he was about twelve. He lived in the city with relatives, in poverty, in conditions he later described with unsentimental precision. He attended Smith Robertson from nineteen twenty-three to nineteen twenty-five and graduated as class valedictorian of Smith Robertson Junior High School in May of that year, at sixteen. He delivered a graduation address he had written himself, not the one the principal had provided.

He left Mississippi later that same year, moving north to Memphis and then Chicago. He was seventeen when he left, and he never came back.

What he took with him became Black Boy, his memoir published in nineteen forty-five. The book opens in Jackson, in his grandmother's house. It documents hunger that was not metaphorical, violence that was not symbolic, and a racial system so pervasive that even the act of wanting to read required concealment. A librarian helped him borrow books from the whites-only public library by writing him a forged note. He listed the books he wanted as if they were for a white man. That is how Richard Wright read.

Black Boy was an immediate success and was immediately challenged. A Mississippi senator tried to have it banned from the mails. The Jackson that Wright described was not the Jackson that Jackson's white leadership preferred to see documented.