Richard Wright would have been 100 years old on Sept. 4. This great black writer not only helped change the face of American fiction, but he also helped pull the curtain down on Jim Crow.

We should commemorate Wright because he defied all the odds. One hundred years ago, he was born poor, black, the son of a sharecropper. In his formative years, he was legally denied access to segregated Southern public libraries.

Raised in poverty and hunger, and barely educated in rural Arkansas and Mississippi, Wright believed that “books are weapons.” His material spat in the face of indifference, forcing readers to acknowledge the racist underside of the American dream.

In “Native Son,” Wright’s most famous literary creation, the young, angry and impoverished Bigger Thomas accidentally kills a white woman, flees the police, and in the course of his flight kills again in cold blood. Despite the ambiguities of his case, Thomas receives the death penalty.

“Native Son” and Wright’s other classic, “Black Boy,” remain on the required reading lists of many high schools and colleges because of the power of their narrative. And Wright’s themes of poverty, the stigma of unequal education and the violence that poverty breeds are sadly still relevant today, six decades after he wrote about them.

But I’m not sure that Richard Wright would have believed that in the year 2008 a black person could be vying for the presidency of the United States. Like Wright, Sen. Barack Obama himself has defied a lot of odds, and he’s attractive, intelligent and brave. And he’s not a bad writer himself.

There’s only one characteristic that Obama sometimes seems to lack in comparison with Wright: righteous indignation.

Anger against injustice, tempered by a rational argument and a benevolent spirit, was the force behind Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and the Rev. Martin Luther King.

Indignation is the force that drives change, especially when it’s politically inexpedient. It’s the force that will keep activists pushing for universal health care, a massive reduction of poverty and the end of the death penalty, regardless of the Democratic or the Republican Party’s acceptance of status quo.

Obama, the unifier, could use a little bit of Wright’s indignation, especially in the face of ad hominem attacks from the McCain camp.

Both Wright and Obama are sources of enormous pride within the black community.

For all their differences in approach, the great protest novelist and the great politician offer positive examples that sometimes the impossible can happen.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and critic living in Charleston, S.C. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.