Melville House Books

Dr. Nathan Wright Jr., the author of seminal texts about the Black Power movement of the 1960s such as Ready to Riot, who was also a life-long Republican and strongly supported Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, has died. Wright, 81, died from kidney disease at his home in east Stroudsburg, PA. According to a New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin, Wright was an ordained minister and had a “scholarly demeanor, perhaps fitting for a man with six degrees, including a doctorate of education from Harvard He was an early mentor of Louis Farrakhan and Martin Luther King, and he also “emphasized that he shared most of the ideology of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown.” In addition to Ready to Riot, he wrote 17 other books, starting, at age 16, with Good Manners for Good People.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.