He attended the local Seventh-day Adventist school from 1920 to 1921, with his aunt Addie as his teacher. But while he lived there, he was finally able to attend school regularly. His grandparents, still mad at him for destroying their house, repeatedly beat Wright and his brother. Soon Richard with his younger brother and mother returned to the home of his maternal grandmother, which was now in the state capital, Jackson, Mississippi, where he lived from early 1920 until late 1925. At the age of 12, he had not yet had a single complete year of schooling. After his mother became incapacitated by a stroke, Richard was separated from his younger brother and lived briefly with his uncle Clark Wilson and aunt Jodie in Greenwood, Mississippi. The Wrights were forced to flee after Silas Hoskins 'disappeared,' reportedly killed by a white man who coveted his successful saloon business. This part of Arkansas was in the Mississippi Delta where former cotton plantations had been.

In 1916 his mother moved with Richard and his younger brother to live with her sister Maggie (Wilson) and Maggie's husband Silas Hoskins (born 1882) in Elaine, Arkansas. He was enrolled at Howe Institute in Memphis from 1915 to 1916. In 1915 Ella put her sons in Settlement House, a Methodist orphanage, for a short time. Wright's mother was so mad that she beat him until he was unconscious. While living in his grandparents' home, he accidentally set the house on fire. In 1911 or 1912 Ella moved to Natchez, Mississippi, to be with her parents. Richard's father left the family when Richard was six years old, and he did not see Richard for 25 years. Civil War and gained freedom through service: his paternal grandfather, Nathan Wright, had served in the 28th United States Colored Troops his maternal grandfather, Richard Wilson, escaped from slavery in the South to serve in the U.S. Each of his grandfathers had taken part in the U.S.

His parents were born free after the Civil War both sets of his grandparents had been born into slavery and freed as a result of the war.

He was the son of Nathan Wright, a sharecropper, and Ella (Wilson), a schoolteacher. Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, at Rucker's Plantation, between the train town of Roxie and the larger river city of Natchez, Mississippi. A historic marker in Natchez, Mississippi, commemorating Richard Wright, who was born near the city Childhood in the South

Richard Wright by Henry Louis Gates Jr.