When Richard Wright’s first novel, Native Son, was published in 1940, American culture “was forever changed.” So wrote literary and cultural historian Irving Howe, signaling that something new had come forth: a raw story that expressed the frustration and rage of Blacks who had suffered long, too long, under Jim Crow and the oppressive restrictions of racism.

Wright had come up to Chicago from the Deep South during the Great Migration. Brilliant and largely self-taught, radicalized, he established himself as the voice of an African American community no longer patient, no longer willing to endure daily indignities, humiliations, and injustices. He took a place at the forefront of a civil rights struggle whose battles would be fought not just in the streets, but, in time, in schools and libraries.

Native Son’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is angry in a lumbering, unfocused way. He torments his family. He beats up his best friend. He wants to lash out by committing a crime, but he doesn’t quite know how to go about it. When he lands a job working for a wealthy White family, he’s intimidated by their kindness—and certainly doesn’t know how to respond to their rebellious daughter’s insistence that they be friends, comrades in the struggle. Says Mary to her boyfriend as Bigger listens patiently, “I want to work among Negroes. That’s where people are needed. It seems as though they’ve been pushed out of everything.”

Indeed. But, in a moment that speaks to all the mores of the time, when Bigger carries a badly drunk Mary back to her room, he encounters Mary’s mother; though she is blind, he worries she will detect his presence. In a desperate moment, not quite purposely and not quite accidentally, he suffocates Mary with a pillow. “His crime seemed natural, he felt that all of his life had been leading to something like this,” Wright tells us. All Bigger can do is run: “He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said.”

When Bigger is finally caught, with more blood on his hands, his lawyer makes it clear that while killing makes it hard for him to get a pass, not all Whites are the enemy. It’s the capitalists who bear the blame for creating a structure, a system in which a man like Bigger doesn’t count and never will: “They want to keep what they own, even if it makes others suffer. In order to keep it, they push men down in the mud and tell them that they are beasts.”

Bigger Thomas is not the blameless Tom Robinson of To Kill a Mockingbird, and Wright challenges the reader to sympathize with a murderer and rapist, albeit one who arrives at a kind of redemption in the end. That’s not an easy brief—one reason why, to this day, Native Son is among the books most frequently banned from libraries and removed from school curricula. Eighty years on, Richard Wright’s angry struggle continues—and his book lives on.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.