Richard Wright's Words Can Be Weapons Against Injustice

Richard Wright once wrote “words can be weapons against injustice.” A quote self evident to Wright’s successful career as a black writer in the Jim Crow South. Born September 4, 1908 on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, the grandson of slaves, published his first short story at the age of 16. The more he read about the world, the more he strived to break apart from the Jim Crow South. After working a series of unskilled jobs, Wright migrated to Chicago where he got an opportunity to write. (A&E) The Library Card is an excerpt from Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945). After reading The Library Card, Kayla Barnes, a former EOF student attested that Wright’s newfound knowledge was definitely more of a curse than a blessing because his situation in the Jim Crow South was completely hopeless.
Three pages into The Library Card and you find yourself peering through the life of Richard Wright and his first jarring, to say the least, interaction with literature: A Book of Prefaces (1917) by H.L Mencken. Mencken was thee first white man that Wright had ever seen denounced by other whites. When Wright had a hard copy of what made newspapers castigate Mencken publicly, Wright was both shaken and deeply moved. “What was this?…. this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as weapons…. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon?(Wright 349)” From birth, Wright had endured tremendous handicaps: racism, poverty, limited education, and family disruption. All factors collectively conditioned Wright to assume the worst of himself. Once exposed to the writing styles of H.L. Mencken, Wright had a sudden, intuitive insight of what he was really capable of as a human being. Therefore Kayla’s assertion is false because despite his circumstances Wright’s newfound knowledge served as a catalyst to his positive