Film Screening of Native Son

One of the most controversial novels of its day, Richard Wright’s Native Son (first published in 1940 and staged by Court in 2014) exposed the injustices of urban Black life, witnessed through the eyes of Bigger Thomas, whose violent tendencies and moral confusion were the natural result of a lifetime of deprivation. In prison for murder and sentenced to death, Bigger (portrayed in the film by the author himself) reflects on the circumstances that led to his fate.

The film adaptation of the novel was similarly contentious, engendering its complex position in the annals of cinema history. Heavily censored by regional film boards upon its 1951 release, Native Son was not viewable in its intended form for over half a century; its depiction of interracial relationships and commentary on racial injustice proved too problematic at the time, and large segments of the film were withheld from American audiences for decades. A recent restoration effort helmed by the Library of Congress, in collaboration with the Buenos Aires Film Museum and film historian Fernando Martin Peña, reconstructed the film in all of its original 107 minutes using a 16mm Argentine print and a 35mm duplicate negative of an uncensored cut found in an abandoned nitrate film vault in Puerto Rico. This restoration premiered in 2016, bringing the film to American screens in its entirety for the very first time.

August 14, 2025 | Screening Room, The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637) | 5:30pm Screening

NATIVE SON AND BIG WHITE FOG

This screening of Native Son is presented in anticipation of the upcoming production of Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog (1938), a play set on Chicago’s segregated South Side on the cusp of the Great Depression. Wright and Ward have conceived similar visions of Chicago: the world inhabited by the Mason family (of Big White Fog) and Thomas family (of Native Son) is one colored by racial tension, economic disparity, and the question of whether a better life is possible under the existing status quo. Both stories speak to what seemed at the beginning of the twentieth century an impossible pursuit of prosperity for Black Americans; presenting these two works in tandem, we seek to dig deeper into the themes that emerge from Ward’s play and how these ideas both intersect with and diverge from written work from other great Black writers of the period. In engaging with Big White Fog and Native Son in conversation, the audience is encouraged to consider how far we’ve come and how much work we still have yet to accomplish in achieving racial equity in Chicago and beyond. 

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