When I was in 5th grade my class did a project about racism. We learned all about the personalities of those who brought forth this issue in American history, and how they came to be who they were. And, what happened to them throughout their lives. Dr. King and others were subjects of study.
Once upon a time there was another Reverend Wright, who stood up for racial justice. With the modern day Rev. Wright, of Obama fame, I see a very different but similar series of events taking place. Racism could end in America, if only those who chose to use it as an excuse for their shortcomings would stop doing so.
Once upon a time, America’s soul was stirred by a brilliant man whose words provoked a national conversation about race, a black man who firmly believed in so-called “social justice”, a man of consequence whose struggles and achievements formed the backdrop of a quintessentially American story.
Who was this man? Not Barack Obama, but the late Richard Wright.
Wright, the author of the iconic 1940 novel Native Son, bore witness to the horrors of the pre-civil-rights South; the anti-black violence of his Mississippi childhood left emotional scars that took decades to heal. Like Obama, Wright settled in Chicago as a young adult and began a long march to national fame; by the mid-1940s, Wright became the most famous African-American author in the United States, a man hailed worldwide for his vivid depictions of racial injustice.
Like Obama, Wright aligned himself with a politically radical entity–in Wright’s case, the American Communist Party. Wright spent years
writing for Communist publications and defending the party’s doctrines. His commitment to Communism was not just professional, but personal; in 1941, shortly after a failed first marriage, he wed Ellen Poplar, a New York Communist Party organizer.
Yet, unlike Obama, Wright gradually opened his eyes to the deep flaws of the radical group he had joined. Wright realized that despite the party’s proclamations of colorblindness, an inflexible racial caste system existed in the organization. He was denounced when he tried to question the party’s orthodoxy, and was rebuked when he raised questions about the treatment of those living in the Soviet Union. Slowly but surely, Wright realized that Communism was oppression disguised as freedom; by the late-1940s, he had severed his ties to the Communist Party.
Wright remained a liberal until the end of his life, but he understood that Communism was poisonous, corrosive, dangerous to the ideals of freedom upon which his vision of liberalism stood. He was loathed by former Communist colleagues for his apostasy, but he never apologized for seeing the truth behind Communism’s lie.
Obama and Hillary and their supporters are seeking a form of communism for America. They’re using examples of social injustice as reasons for this. Do we ever learn from our history? Do liberals even know of it? I don’t think so. Why does a conservative author such as D.R. Tucker write and remind some of us about the other Rev. Wright? Why the silence from those on the left? Do they not want this history recalled and it’s lesson’s re-taught? I think so.
