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Louis tompkins wright biography

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Topic | Dr. Louis T. Wright

Dr. Louis Tompkins Wright (1891-1952), the outstanding African American surgeon, leader and activist was born July 23, 1891 in Georgia. Louis came from a family of medical professionals. His father, Ceah K. Wright (1854-1895), was both a physician and minister. He died when Louis was 4 years old. At age 8 years, his widowed mother, Lula Tompkins Wright, married Dr. William Fletcher Penn, an Atlanta physician.

Louis attended Clark University in Atlanta, and then Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated fourth in his class in 1915. He completed an internship at Freedmens’ Hospital and then returned to Atlanta to practice medicine with his step-father.  There he founded with his stepfather and others, Atlanta’s NAACP chapter, and served as treasurer on the executive committee.  After service in World War I and re-starting his medical and surgical career in New York Citry, Wright, in 1935 at age 44, would become the first African American chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors, a voluntary position that he held until his de

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Louis Tompkins Wright: Surgeon, scientist, civil rights activist

The year is 1919. The place is Harlem, New York City. Effective at the onset of the New Year, a new physician is appointed as outpatient clinical assistant, the lowest rank for any doctor at Harlem Hospital. Normally, the appointment would go unnoticed, but not this time. That’s because the entire medical staff of the hospital is white and the new doctor is African American – or "Negro," to use the term of the era.

Harlem Hospital was considered progressive for having added a few black nurses to the otherwise all-white staff two years before, as even in the US North medicine was segregated. The new doctor was a graduate of Harvard Medical School; his father and stepfather were both physicians too, the latter one of the earliest African Americans to receive an MD from Yale. Nevertheless, until now, the only opportunities for an African American physician wishing to do more than general practice lay in small, private, black-run hospitals.

That was the situation on January 1, 1920, when the appointment of Dr. Lou

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Dr. Louis T. Wright was born in 1891 at LaGrange, Georgia. He attended Clark University and then Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated in 1915. While serving in the Army Medical Corps during the First World War he introduced intradermal vaccination for smallpox. In 1919 he secured a position at Harlem Hospital, where in 1938 he became director of attending surgeons and director of the medical board. In 1948 he was hailed as the first clinician to investigate the treatment of humans with Aureomycin. At the same time, he served as chairman of the national board of directors of the N.A.A.C.P.

Until his death in 1952, Dr. Wright was a relentless opponent of racial prejudice, discrimination, and injustice. He stood solidly in favor of a responsive, fully integrated Harlem Hospital, which he considered to be the social obligation of the city of New York to provide. He stood equally firm in opposition to the social alternative of a privately funded, "charity" hospital which would obviate the need for the city to meet its obligations. He is especially rememb

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