Crispus A. Wright
This date marks the birth of Crispus Attucks Wright, a Black civil rights lawyer and businessman, in 1914.
Wright's father was born a slave in Louisiana and graduated from Louisiana's Leland University. The elder Wright was a teacher and high school principal who stressed the importance of education to his children.
Young Wright came to Los Angeles with his dying father, who wanted to live his final days in what was then the Southland of the West's cleansing, dry air. Wright sold newspapers at the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue.
While attending Manual Arts High School, Wright often stopped at the Los Angeles County Courthouse to watch lawyers arguing cases. There, he observed the skill of Willis O. Tyler, one of LA's outstanding Black lawyers, and his interest in law and civil rights gained momentum. Wright attended the University of California at LA (UCLA) and USC Law School while working at a drugstore and the Vernon Branch Library. He earned a B.A. in political science (1936) and his L.L.B. (1938) from USC.
In 1940, Wright opened his firm in south-central Los Angeles. Three years later, he co-founded the John M. Langston Bar Association of Los Angeles, which remains the principal Black legal association in the LA area. As a young lawyer, Wright helped the NAACP prepare the late-1940s case that led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down restrictive real estate contracts as unconstitutional. Wright also owned and operated several businesses in the Los Angeles area and was chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Sentinel.
After nearly 50 years in the legal profession, he closed his office in Beverly Hills in 1987. He was a member of the National Bar Association, the American Bar Association, and the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.
In 1997, Wright gave $2 million to the University of Southern California's Law Center to establish a scholarship in his name. The $50 scholarship that helped him through law school partially inspired his donation to his old school.
Crispus Attucks Wright died on Dec. 4, 2001, in Los Angeles.
The University of Southern California
Law and Public Policy Department
Gillian Silsby, USC Law School
(213) 740-9690
