Quote by Richard Wright: “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.”

Writing into uncertainty — speaking when you do not know if anyone is listening — is an act of faith and determination. Wright describes the experience of speaking from the margins, sending your truth out without knowing if it will be received, and continuing anyway.

Wright wrote this in Black Boy, his autobiography published in 1945. He was describing the impulse that drove him to write while growing up in the Jim Crow South, where his intellectual life was actively suppressed and literacy itself was understood as a threat to the racial order.

American novelist and critic whose 1940 novel Native Son and 1945 autobiography Black Boy brought the brutality of American racism into stark focus for mainstream readers. Wright was one of the first African American authors to achieve widespread commercial and critical success in the United States.