Wright, Nathan, Jr. 1923-2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born August 5, 1923, in Shreveport, LA; died of kidney disease February 4, 2005, in East Stroudsburg, PA. Chaplain, activist, educator, and author. A minister in the Episcopal Church, Wright was a passionate but moderate voice advocating black power in America. After serving in the U.S. Army medical administrative corps during World War II, he graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1947. He then attended the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, earning an M.A. and B.D. in 1950, the same year he was ordained. The next year, he completed an S.T.M. degree at Harvard Univeristy and later also earned a doctorate in education there in 1964. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Wright was a rector in Boston, as well as a chaplain at the Children's Medical Center there. The civil rights movement was at its height at this time, but Wright was by no means new to the cause for equal rights. Back in 1946, when he was still a university student, he had come into conflict with police officers during a protest. In 1947 he and several other blacks and whites rode public buses together through the South as part of the "Journey of Reconciliation." The purpose of this demonstration was to drive home the point that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the previous year that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. It was an idea ahead of its time, but it would prove an effective method of protest in later years. By the 1960s, the civil rights movement was beginning to split between moderate factions led by the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and more radical African Americans who believed black people could only make a difference by acting on their own. Although Wright fell into the latter way of thinking, he was more temperate in his methods than people such as his friend Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam. Wright, who at the time was working for the Diocese of Newark's Department of Urban Work, helped bring the two sides together as chair of the 1967 National Conference on Black Power. The next year, he also came forward as a voice of reason with the publication of his book Let's Work Together (1968), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He also began writing a regular column for the Newark Star-Ledger that year. In 1969 Wright entered the academic world as professor of urban affairs and founding chair of the department of Afro-American studies at the State University of New York at Albany. He later left New York and moved to New Jersey in 1981 to become the communications director of Passaic County Community College; his later years were largely dedicated to traveling and lecturing for the Episcopal Church. Among Wright's other publications are The Riddle of Life (1952), Black Power and Urban Unrest: The Creative Possibilities (1967), and What Black Politicians Are Saying (1972).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2005, p. B11.

New York Times, February 24, 2005, p. C17.

Washington Post, March 6, 2005, p. C12.