April 29, 1945

The memoir by Richard Wright about his upbringing in Roxie, Mississippi, “Black Boy,” became the top-selling book in the U.S.

Wrighyt described Roxie as “swarming with rats, cats, dogs, fortune tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent collectors, and children.”

In his home, he looked to his mother: “My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life.”

When he was alone, he wrote, “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

Reading became his refuge.

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books,” he wrote. “Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.”

In the end, he discovered that “if you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find you are not alone.” He was the first Black author to see his work sold through the Book-of-a-Month Club.

Wright's novel, “Native Son,” told the story of Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old Black man whose bleak life leads him to kill. Through the book, he sought to expose the racism he saw: “I was guided by but one criterion: to tell the truth as I saw it and felt it. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.”

The novel, which sold more than 250,000 copies in its first three weeks, was turned into a play on Broadway, directed by Orson Welles. He became friends with other writers, including Ralph Ellison in Harlem and Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in Paris. His works played a role in changing white Americans' views on race.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today's Adam Ganucheau, Bobby Harrison and Geoff Pender break down the final negotiations of the 2024 legislative session's three major issues: Medicaid expansion, education funding, and retirement system reform.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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House and Senate Republicans continued to haggle over Medicaid expansion proposals Sunday, and the state budget process hit a snag after leaders couldn't reach final agreements by a Saturday night deadline on how to spend $7 billion.

House Speaker Jason White on Sunday told his chamber that Medicaid expansion negotiators from the House and Senate had been meeting and he expected a compromise “will be filed by Monday or Tuesday at the latest.”

House Medicaid Chairwoman Missy McGee said the Senate had delivered another counter proposal on expansion Sunday evening but declined to provide details. Her Senate counterpart, Medicaid Chairman Kevin Blackwell, declined comment on Sunday. The two leaders met in McGee's office on Sunday evening following a Saturday afternoon meeting.

READ MORE: House, Senate close in on Medicaid expansion agreement

Lawmakers have for the past couple of months been debating on how to expand Medicaid coverage for poor Mississippians and help the state's flagging hospitals. The House initially voted to expand coverage to an estimated 200,000 people, and accept more that $1 billion a year in federal dollars to cover the cost, as most other states have done. The Senate initially passed a far more austere plan, that would cover about 40,000 people, and would decline the extra federal money to cover costs.

Since those plans passed, each has offered counter proposals, but no deal has been reached.

A group of about 50 clergy, physicians and other citizens who support full expansion showed up at the Capitol on Sunday to sit in the Senate gallery and deliver letters to key leaders who are negotiating a final plan.

“When we stand before the Lord, he's not going to ask how much money did you save the state. He's going to ask you what you did for the least of these,” Monsignor Elvin Sounds, a retired Catholic priest, said outside the Senate gallery on Sunday.

READ MORE: A solution to the Republican impasse on Medicaid expansion

Lawmakers hit an impasse on setting a $7 billion state budget and missed Saturday night's deadline for filing appropriations bills. This will force the legislature into extra innings, and require lawmakers to vote to push back deadlines. Lawmakers had expected to end this year's session and leave Jackson by early this week. But House Speaker Jason White told his chamber on Sunday they should expect to continue working through Friday, “and possibly through Saturday or Sunday.

White later said of the budget impasse, “When you get to haggling over spending $7 billion, folks are going to have disagreements.”

Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, said “things are fluid. But everybody is working.”

He looked at his watch and said “It is 5 o'clock. By 6 o'clock what I tell you will have changed.”

White said one reason for the session having to run extra innings is that when he became speaker he vowed to House members that he would not continue the practice of passing much of the state budget last-minute, late at night or in the wee hours of the morning with little or no time for lawmakers to read or vet what they are passing.

He said the House was prepared early Saturday night to file budget bills with agreed-upon numbers, but not to file “dummy bills” with zeros or blanks and continue haggling a budget late into the night.

“I made a promise that we are not going to keep them up here until midnight, then plow through all these budget bills,” White said. “We had had a gentleman's agreement (between the House and Senate) earlier in the session to negotiate a budget by April 15. That didn't happen … We are not going to do everything last minute with no time for our members to read things and ask questions. We are not going to do it in the middle of the night.”

READ MORE: Senate negotiators a no-show for second meeting with House on Medicaid expansion

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.