Sometimes to understand the present you must revisit the past. Our youth need to understand our history which is not taught in our schools today. Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, at Rucker’s Plantation, between of Roxie and the larger river city of Natchez, Mississippi. I am in Jackson, MS but I studied Black Literature at a small Community College in Monmouth County New Jersey and later attended a Historically Black College now called Hampton University. Mr. Ellison moved from Roxie to Jackson then Memphis and Chicago. He later through journalism would land in New York that would lead him towards communism and later to Paris France. Social Visibility is more important now than it was then. Our greatest poets today are rappers such as Tupac in its own time. His lyrics are poetry just as it was in the past with Langston Hughes — The New Harlem. The outcome of Charlottesville tells us our Native Son is still home. President Barack Obama modeled his memoir Dreams from My Father on Ralph Ellison’s novel because he too knew that it is our color that makes us socially invisible. Frantz Fanon a favorite black writer/poet once said “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. Mississippi is number 3 in having the highest number of hate groups in the United States and this state is 53% black.
Mr. Leon thank you for bring us full circle.
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