Richard Wright (1908) It was on this date, September 4, 1908, that African-American writer Richard Wright was born outside Natchez, Mississippi, the son of an illiterate sharecropper father and a well-educated school teacher mother. Early on, Wright developed a fascination with books – a love of learning that only deepened his dissatisfaction with life as […]

"The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon 'hell and damnation,'" wrote DuBois. Anti-rational dogma repelled him, and he ceased participating in organized worship as a young adult.