Yes, Black Boy Is Banned!

Black Boy is Richard Wright’s autobiography of growing up in Mississippi and Tennessee during the Jim Crow era. He describes a childhood of hunger, violence, racism, and a fierce, unquenchable desire to read and write. Wright’s family moved constantly, his father abandoned them, and the world around him enforced a brutal racial hierarchy at every turn. The book follows him from the rural South to Memphis to Chicago, where he began his writing career. Published in 1945 by Harper & Brothers, it was an immediate bestseller and became a foundational text of American literature.

The book has been banned or challenged almost continuously since publication. Tennessee removed it from schools in 1966 for being “obscene” and “instigating hatred between the races.” In 1976, it was restricted at the Island Trees school district in New York until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Board of Education v. Pico (1982) that schools can’t remove books based on disagreement with their ideas. In Duval County, Florida, parents in 1993 called it “disruptive of racial harmony.” In Brunswick County, North Carolina, a county commissioner told the school board that “the only result of reading such a book will be ‘Trash in, trash out.’” The board voted 3-2 to keep it.

Why You Should Read This

Wright wrote about hunger in a way that makes your stomach clench. Not just for food, though there’s plenty of that, but for knowledge, for dignity, for a life where being Black didn’t mean being invisible or brutalized. He stole library cards, lied about his intentions, smuggled books home. Reading was an act of resistance.

The people who’ve tried to ban Black Boy for eighty years keep using the same word: “obscene.” But what’s obscene is the world Wright describes, not his description of it. The Jim Crow South was obscene. The poverty was obscene. The casual violence was obscene. Wright bore witness to all of it with precision and fury, and the result is one of the most important American autobiographies ever written. Calling it “disruptive of racial harmony” tells you everything about who’s doing the disrupting, and it isn’t the book.