Sunday, October 11, 2015

10.9.15 Something beautiful

What a magnificent voice. Richard Wright 1908-1960, parents sharecropper and school teacher. Mississippi. At 17 moved to Memphis to work , used forged notes to be allowed to borrow books from the library, purportedly fir a white man. Moved to Chicago at 19, write poems. NY @29, wrote his first 4 books. France invited him to come live there without fear; he moved and stayed in what to him became a land without prejudice. Now get a load of this:

"I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness; I was acting on impulses that southern senators in the nations capital had striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo." Richard Wright

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