Richard Wright

Wright was born on 4 September 1908, not in town but on Rucker's Plantation in the Cranfield-Roxie area of northeast Adams County, some twenty miles from Natchez. His father Nathan was a sharecropper; his mother Ella Wilson Wright was a schoolteacher. The family left Natchez for Memphis in 1913, and when his father deserted them his mother took low-paying jobs and the boys moved between relatives in Jackson, Elaine, West Helena and Greenwood. He told that childhood in Black Boy in 1945 and died in Paris in 1960.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Forks of the Road — 0.9 mi
  The 1832-1863 slave market a mile east of downtown Natchez, the second busiest in the Deep South, now a Natchez National Historical Park site with exhibit panels.
• Natchez Museum of African American History and Culture — 0.9 mi
  A museum in the old 1904 post office on Main Street, opened in 1991, covering slavery, Reconstruction and the Natchez civil rights movement.
• William Johnson House — 1.0 mi
  The brick home and shop block of a free Black barber and diarist in Natchez, who enslaved others himself and was shot by a neighbor in 1851.
• Fort Rosalie — 1.4 mi
  The bluff where the French built Fort Rosalie in 1716 and the Natchez attacked it in 1729, now a free Natchez National Historical Park site beside the southern end of the Natchez Trace.

More markers nearby

• Birthplace of Jackson State University — 0.5 mi
• Natchez City Cemetery — 0.6 mi
• Holy Family Catholic Church — 0.7 mi
• Papa Lightfoot — 0.7 mi