Eudora Welty was not only a jewel but an emblem of the South. Richard Wright, self-exiled from home at the age of 17, became a symbol of black anger and empowerment. Both writers hailed from the same small town of Jackson, Mississippi, and were born within nine months of each other—Wright in 1908 and Welty in 1909. Yet they never met.

Eudora Welty and Richard Wright were born in Jackson, Mississippi, nine months apart, yet they never met.

Ellen Ann Fentress, a writer living in Jackson, ponders why. Though the writers’ childhoods—Wright’s one of deprivation and discrimination, and Welty’s one of privilege and parental pampering—were spent “a Jim Crow galaxy” apart, their careers ran roughly parallel as they worked in the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, published early-career short stories in 1936, came out with well received books (Wright,Uncle Tom’s Childrenin 1938 andNative Sonin 1940; Welty,A Curtain of Greenin 1941 andThe Robber Bridegroomthe next year), received a Guggenheim each, and won multiple O. Henry awards.

And there were mutual acquaintances to introduce them—the writer Ralph Ellison and the 1940s “literary powerhouse couple” of Edward Aswell (Wright’s editor) and Mary Louise Aswell (Welty’s close friend). Welty visited both New York City and Paris while Wright was living in those cities, and when Wright’s memoirBlack Boycame out in 1945, she refusedThe Journal of Mississippi History’s requestthat she review it. The two writers’ failure to connect, concludes Fentress, “had to have been deliberate.”

While conceding that it is a “slippery business” to speculate about a “relationship that didn’t happen,” she insists it’s worthwhile to consider why a seemingly inevitable meeting never occurred. In the memoir ofHarper’seditor Willie Morris,North Toward Home(1967),Fentress discerns an inkling: Wright was a guilty reminder of the complicity that even a “decent white Southerner” had in a “diseased civilization.”As a young man, Morris had sought out Wright in Paris, but the night that the two shared at a bar was awkward, and Morris didn't follow up on Wright's suggestion that they correspond.“He felt that with Wright,” Fentress writes, “he was at the wrong end of history’s pointing finger.” Welty rarely addressed race directly in her work and was afraid of reprisals against her and her mother if she openly defied “local racist customs,” but, writes Fentress, she didn’t avoid Wright merely out of “petty pragmatism.” It wasn’t “as much about Wright as about what he set off in a thoughtful, pre–Civil Rights white person.”

Why should we care about this “tidbit” of midcentury history? Recently, the FBI reopened 108 cold murder cases from the civil rights era, and in a town south of Jackson, the school board held a “graduation” for 10 members of the class of 1962 who were expelled as seniors for their civil rights activities. The wrongs and shortcomings of the past still resonate. “When we circle back to Southern history in this more evolved time,” writes Fentress, “it is because we want to show that we pass our own muster. When we step in to fix past failures, we cast ourselves in the story, too, an outlying speck on the Civil Rights timeline.”

: “Intimate Strangers” by Ellen Ann Fentress, in 

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Eudora Welty was not only a jewel but an emblem of the South. 

Welty's Southern Discomfort

African Americans and the Roma of Eastern Europe may live thousands of miles apart, but their histories have taken remarkably similar paths. Both groups suffered centuries of slavery, were emancipated in the middle of the 19th century, and endured decades of poverty and segregation. But around World War II, their stories diverge. In the United States, the civil rights movement began to take shape, while in Europe, the Nazis killed as many as 1.5 million Roma in the Holocaust. Under communism, Roma got jobs and apartments, but they continued to receive inferior educations in segregated schools. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, they were ill prepared to work in a capitalist economy and have since fallen into “staggering” poverty. In some Roma areas, the unemployment rate is 100 percent.

The Roma (also known as Gypsies, though that term is no longer widely used) need to take a page from the civil rights movement’s playbook, writes Jack Greenberg, one of the lawyers who argued 

 and the former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 2003, Roma leaders invited him to Eastern Europe to help them figure out how to desegregate schools. But Greenberg found that the Roma lack the makings of a political movement. Missing were the churches, institutions of higher education, and organized civil-society groups—features of American society that made the civil rights movement not only possible but successful.

Roma arrived in Eastern Europe from northern India perhaps as early as the fourth century. Today, they are one of the fastest-growing groups in Eastern Europe. In the four countries Greenberg studied, Roma make up as little as two to three percent of the population (Czech Republic) to as much as eight to 10 (Bulgaria). Hungary and Romania fall somewhere in between, though the data are rough approximations. Everywhere, Roma are poor and uneducated. Maybe as little as one percent of Roma have a college education, and 70 to 80 percent have not completed primary school.

European law prohibits discrimination against the Roma, and courts at both the European and national levels have ruled in favor of Roma in individual anti-discrimination cases. But the verdicts have been toothless. National authorities, despite passing desegregation laws, have shied away from enforcing them, in part because of a residual, postcommunist resistance to centralized power.

Greenberg says that without a Roma rights movement, there is little hope of achieving integration. Roma scarcely participate in politics at all. There is only one Roma member of the European Parliament, and Roma across the board vote in very low numbers. To complicate matters, some Roma don’t support desegregation, fearing that it will lead to assimilation and the loss of their cultural heritage. It’s time to put an end to this, says Greenberg. “Europe has dithered long enough with one of the gravest humanitarian and economic crises of our time.”

“Report on Roma Education Today: From Slavery to Segregation and Beyond”

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African Americans and the Roma of Eastern Europe may live thousands of miles apart, but their histories have taken remarkably similar paths.

Separate and Unequal in Eastern Europe

 and the thing that pops into just about everyone’s mind is Bauhaus architecture, codeword for boring, sleek, soulless, corporate design. This is all a terrible misunderstanding, declares architecture critic Martin Filler. The Bauhaus was not an architectural movement but a school for artists, architects, and designers whose uniqueness was found “not so much [in] its departure from prevailing aesthetic norms—specifically its rejection of historical styles—but rather [in] its systematic recasting of the way in which the fine and applied arts were taught.” (Many buildings deemed Bauhaus are actually Modernist works by Modernist stars who had nothing at all to do with the Bauhaus, Filler insists.)

The school was founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 and closed at its final location in Berlin (on suspicion of 

—cultural Bolshevism) when Hitler came to power in 1933. The Bauhaus’s key innovation was the 

, “a required introductory class that provided intensive back-to-basics immersion in the fundamentals of color theory and composition.” The course was conceived and taught by Johannes Itten, “the extravagantly eccentric, mystically inclined Swiss Expressionist painter . . . an oddball even for a radical art school,” who often donned medieval-style robes and sandals and “consumed copious quantities of garlic.”

Itten, Filler writes, was “the id to the superego” of architect Walter Gropius, the school’s first director. Together, the pair represented “both sides of the Bauhaus’s bifurcated nature, at once utopian and pragmatic, intuitive and scientific, highly ordered and subversively anarchic.” Itten left the Bauhaus in 1923 in protest over Gropius’s intent to focus on commercial prototypes rather than theoretical design.

An exhibit that ran from November 2009 to January 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, “Bauhaus 1919–1933,” offered “an eye-opening experience for those familiar only with the cliché of the Bauhaus as a soulless assembly line of mechanistic design.” The show included 

 (1919–1920) by Theobald Emil Müller-Hummel, a wooden sculpture carved from a World War I fighter plane propeller. “Closely resembling an oceanic tribal totem, this 

—taken from an engine of mass destruction and metamorphosed into a talisman of social transformation—movingly summarizes the Expressionist search for spiritual treasure amid the wreckage of industrialized warfare,” Filler writes.

Beyond the characters of Itten and Gropius, those interested in understanding the Bauhaus should turn to two artists who exerted a “tremendous” influence on the school, Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). Kandinsky’s “pulsating colors and hyperactive forms” and Moholy-Nagy’s innovations with photography and sculpture are a far cry from the Modernist architectural style “Bauhaus” normally evokes.

The Wilson Center