Mississippi Quote of the Day: Richard Wright and "Our America"

Born in Adams County, Mississippi, Richard Wright was the grandson of slaves and the son of a sharecropper. With books like “Native Son,” “Black Boy” and “Uncle Tom’s Children,” he became one of the most prominent African-American authors of the 20th century and an outspoken critic of the Jim Crow South. In his autobiography, “Black Boy,” he wrote bluntly about how America, as a nation, has fallen short of its promise due to willful ignorance, fear and narrow-mindedness:
“Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.”