on the first issue of the RICHARD WRIGHT NEWS BULLETIN

 

On the first issue of the Richard Wright News Bulletin

(brief comments for Julia Wright, Malcolm Wright, and Maxime Desirat)

 

Dear Julia,

In Volume 1, No. 1 (Spring 1991) of the Richard Wright Newsletter (RWN), you accepted the invitation "to become one of the founding members of the Richard Wright Circle," and you recommended that the Circle "extend its goals to a practical and dynamic insertion of Richard Wright's life, message and work into the mainstream of our Black community life and the nation's cultural centers of Black History."  Although the Circle and RWN have been hibernating since 2006, your founding of the Richard Wright News Bulletin (RWNB) resuscitates the work of inserting and remembering we originally intended.

In Part One of RWNB, your phrase "the cruel imperfection of absence of closure" gains my passionate attention.  It is a fine reminder that closure, whether we are engaging your father's works or contemporary crises,  is a mirage.  Its absence is indeed cruel, because so many people confuse absence and presence as if they were interchangeable.  It is actually the case that we endlessly negotiate continuity and change.  In that sense, RWNB is a logical continuation of the Circle and RWN.  Those who read  Richard Wright will applaud your prescience.

Dear Malcolm,

You spike my concern about continuity by asserting "the same culture of struggle continues to speak to us."  As your grandfather knew very well, that culture is global.  I do ask the world, however, can you listen and ultimately understand what you hear?  Thus, I hope that in a future issue of RWNB you will seize the opportunity to meditate on 12 Million Black Voices (1941), explaining what the texts and the photographs might mean for you.  The 80th anniversary of that book invites us to ponder the difference between the evidence of folk history then and now. Perhaps the evidence warns us to be cautious about too quickly applauding "progress."

Dear Maxime,

Your grandmother spoke of your RWNB contribution's possessing a "fragilized sense of time."  For your generation, time is more complex  than it was for Richard Wright.  I am curious about how you and your peers read  your great-grandfather in a period when instant access is dominant.  How do you respond to this fragment of exchange between Wright and his mother in Black Boy (page 47 of the 75th anniversary edition):

"Mama, is Granny white?" I asked as the train rolled through the darkness.

"If you've got eyes, you can see what color she is," my mother said.

I believe RWNB will serve us well as an instrument for adjusting and enhancing moral vision.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            September 20, 2020

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