Giles R. Wright II and the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series

These words are brought on behalf of the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience and the Marion Thompson Wright Study Club, two entities that my friend Giles R. Wright II cared for deeply, persistently enriched and helped to shape. He died recently, on February 5, 2009. Those who knew him well are at a terrible loss for words and actions to fully acknowledge how our lives and times will unfold without him. For my part, I have lost a dear friend, civic colleague, and fellow traveler.

Giles and I met in the early 1980s, at the behest of our mutual friend and fellow historian, Dr. Ronald Grele. Ron knew us both and for what I were all the right reasons he insisted that we meet. Giles was newly hired as the inaugural director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission. I was on the faculty at Rutgers. We hit it off immediately, laying the foundation for a friendship that involved our closest friends, our families, our values, our love of humor and aspirations. Giles introduced me to the wondrous musical world of Miles Davis and I returned the favor by introducing him to the scholarship of P. Sterling Stuckey.

Friendships over time take on different and usually deeper meanings. Such was the case with my friendship with Giles. We decided early on to establish a Black History Month Lecture Series that would illuminate the work of the nation's foremost scholars during February in New Jersey. At the time, we had grown weary of a month that had seemingly lost its original purpose, that laid forth by Carter G. Woodson in 1926. Woodson wanted what in the old days was Negro History Week to encourage the study of Africans on American soil and throughout the African Diaspora. Our effort became the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series, named in honor of a New Jersey native and among the first professionally trained women historians in the United States. The Series that bears her name is now in its twenty-ninth year as one of the nation’s foremost public rituals devoted to the historical literacy of a local community. Beginning in 1981, with a splendid lecture by Professor P. Sterling Stuckey and a host of other scholars, the MTW Series is at the center of what Giles and I, and our respective institutions, sought to contribute to New Jersey’s public history and humanities movements here. The Series has brought out the very best in public engagement by scores of very talented historians, humanists, and artists, and it is arguably the most diverse assemblage of citizens and settlers to observe Black History Month in the American Republic. Giles lent to the Series his astute understanding of changing priorities and sensibilities in African American historiography. And each year he was the gentle, polished, and engaging moderator of the afternoon session. We would always talk soon after the conference, held without fail on the third Saturday of February, wondering out loud why so many people showed up, why the audience was reverent, and why year after year the MTW Series grew in prestige. We concluded, quite simply, that our success was quite simple: we invited our community to the Paul Robeson Campus Center and they accepted our invitation.

Over the years, we brought others into our circle of public service, including Larry Greene, Lenworth Gunther, Leonard Muse, Barry Jackson, the late Sabarah Sabin, the late Jeanette Cascone, and the late Lee Hagen, among others, those who share our joy for public service informed by the bittersweet narratives of Africans on American soil. Along the way, Giles emerged as New Jersey’s most consistently conscientious narrator and scholar of African American history here. His many publications, lectures, speeches, media appearances, and his willingness to serve all who needed to know of the life and times of Paul Robeson, the Underground Railroad, Fanny Lou Hamer, historic black towns, places, cemeteries, and the anonymous, yet heroic, standard bearers of modern African American life here, was substantial and endearing.

Giles Wright was a historian of and for the people. We assemble this year without his formidable presence, but assemble we must. Next year’s Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series Program, the thirtieth anniversary, will be dedicated to his life and to his good work.

Clement Alexander Price
Newark, New Jersey
February 10, 2009