Richard R. Wright

In 1890, Emanuel K. Love and Wright were in a dispute with William White, Judson Lyons, Henry A. Rucker, and especially John H. Deveaux, who was in control of Georgia's African American Republic Party machinery. The dispute centered around leadership of the party district nomination conventions. Lyons, Rucker, and Deveaux were all supported by patronage of Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute and were identified with light-skinned elites, while Love and Wright (and Charles T. Walker) represented a "black" or "darker-skinned" faction, although skin color was not as important as political allegiance and ideology.[6]

In 1896, Alfred Eliab Buck was the leader of the Georgia Republican Party. Buck was the president of the Republican State Convention in late April and presided over the electing of delegates to the 1896 Republican National Convention. There was dispute over the delegates, which Buck attempted to preempt by passing a "harmony" slate of delegates outside of standard procedure. However, the slate did not include Wright, who many believed would be a delegate. The convention erupted in protest and a representative of Buck's attempted to adjourn the meeting and the Buck faction left the hall. The Wright faction remained and Wright's friend, Emanuel K. Love took the chair, electing a new slate of delegates, now including Love and Buck (but still not Wright).[7] Eventually Wright was not selected as a delegate, but did attend as an alternate.[8]

In August 1898, President William McKinley appointed him as major and paymaster of United States Volunteers in the United States Army. He was the first African American to serve as a U.S. Army paymaster. During the Spanish–American War, he was the highest ranking African-American officer.[5][9] He was honorably discharged in December of the same year.

Although not nearly as well known as Rosa Parks, Richard Wright wrote a landmark letter to Harry Truman describing the horrible mistreatment of a Black returned veteran, Isaac Woodard, who was severely beaten by white policemen, who also gouged his eyes out. As a result of this letter and advocacy by the NAACP, President Truman asked his Attorney General Tom Clark to investigate. Clark brought a federal case against the police and sheriff who abused Woodard, but the all-white jury acquitted them. Wright together with others, including White liberals, advocated for a federal civil rights commission. Agreeing with this, Truman formed a Committee on Civil Rights which made far reaching and prescient recommendations, including that there should be a permanent Civil Rights division of the Justice Department and that the entire Executive branch of the federal government should be desegregated. As a result, Truman was the President who first ordered the desegregation of all branches of the military. The US military has remained desegregated ever since.

In June 1898, his son Richard R. Wright Jr. received the first baccalaureate degree awarded by Georgia State Industrial College. He went on to become the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, having studied in the new field of sociology. He became a professor and later president of Wilberforce University in Ohio and a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.[3]

One of Richard Jr's daughters, Dr. Ruth Wright Hayre, also earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. They were the first African-American father and daughter to do so. Dr. Ruth Wright Hayre became the first full-time African-American teacher in the Philadelphia public-school system. She served as a senior high-school principal and as the first female president of the Philadelphia Board of Education. At the age of 80, she established the "Tell Them We Are Rising" program, promising to pay college tuition for 116 sixth-graders in two poor North Philadelphia schools if they completed high school. Her story was chronicled in her book Tell Them We Are Rising: A Memoir of Faith in Education, published in 1997, the year before she died.[4]

Wright invited national and local leaders to meet in Philadelphia to formulate plans to set aside February 1 each year to memorialize the signing of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by President Abraham Lincoln on February 1, 1865, which freed all U.S. slaves.[1] One year after Wright's death in 1947, both houses of the U.S. Congress passed a bill to make February 1 National Freedom Day. The holiday proclamation was signed into law on June 30, 1948, by President Harry Truman. It was the forerunner to Black History Day and later Black History Month, officially recognized in 1976, though began by Carter G. Woodson in 1926.[5][12]