Fifty years after the publication of "Black Boy," Richard Wright's searing autobiography, his daughter Julia Wright went to New York from her home in Paris for a series of events marking the anniversary, including a lecture at Baruch College.
In a telephone interview, Julia Wright said that her father could not have written the book had he not first written "Native Son," the novel about Bigger Thomas, a young black man whose fear and fury drive him to murder a white woman."He had to write out all the sound and fury in `Native Son,' " she said, "so that five years later in `Black Boy' he could use the first-person singular and become father to himself and describe the childhood he had had, which was no childhood to speak of."
She added: "My father ended the book with Bigger alone facing the electric chair, but he couldn't get rid of Bigger. He was haunted by him."
"What is unknown about my father," she said, "is that between writing `Native Son' in 1940 and `Black Boy' in 1945, he saved a prisoner." Wright said that her father persuaded the governor of New Jersey to set free Clinton Brewer, who had been convicted of murder, and then saved him from the death penalty when he killed again.
His causes have become hers. "I am working with a coalition in Paris that is trying to save the life of Mumia Abu-Jamal," she said, referring to the death-row inmate in Pennsylvania who has become for many people a symbol of the opposition to the death penalty. "I am trying to prolong some of the things my father did."