Richard Wright, a staunch African-American rights advocator born in 1908 on a plantation in Mississippi, lived in Memphis, Tennessee until his father abandoned him and his mother when he was seven. This forced Wright to live in an orphanage for months. In Wright's eighth year his uncle was lynched, and his family was forced to flee in the dead of night without ever being able to see the body. Also, when Wright was nine, his mother had a stroke on her left side, paralyzing her, and causing him to move further South instead of North to freedom with his brother. All of these traumas and more turned Wright's childhood into a world of suffering, making him a scarred and bitter man. Nonetheless, he moved to Chicago during the Great Depression and again to New York during the Great Migration, never able to find his niche. He joined the Communist...