Volume 52, Number 3 · February 24, 2005
'Blood on the Forge'
By Darryl Pinckney
William Attaway, born in 1911, was of Richard Wright's generation, and, like Wright, he came to Chicago from Mississippi and found his voice in the Marxist literary climate of the 1930s. Attaway was middle-class, some distance from the poverty of Wright's youth, yet even though his father was a doctor and his mother a schoolteacher he would have been as vulnerable as Wright's people to the violence of the racism in Mississippi. Attaway's family moved to Chicago when he was five years old, early on in what became known as the Great Migration, the mass movement of black laborers from the exhausted South to the industrial cities of the North, where World War I had interrupted the supply of European immigrant workers. Most black people were getting away from the predictability of lynch mobs as much as they were escaping the hopelessness of debt peonage, and prosperous blacks were also the targets of resentful whites in the South.
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