ABSTRACT
Richard R. Wright was 65 years old when he joined the Great Migration. He never planned to leave Savannah. He’d spent his entire life in Georgia. He was a respected leader in the Black community. He’d served as principal of the first publicly funded Black high school in the state, and then he spent 30 years as one of the few Black college presidents in the country. People in town still called him “Major Wright,” after the rank he earned in the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century. So, he took it as an affront when a bank employee physically attacked his daughter because she asked why she was not extended the same courtesy as a White customer. For Richard Wright, who’d given his adult life to the education of Savannah’s youth, it stung to feel Savannah’s fist in return. It stung even more to realize that education, after all those years, would not triumph over hate.
