The Marion Thompson Wright Reader: Edited and with a Biographical Introduction by Graham Russell Gao Hodges

By Graham Russell Gao Hodges

In The Marion Thompson Wright Reader, acclaimed historian Graham Russell Hodges provides a scholarly, accessible introduction to a modern edition of Marion Thompson Wright’s classic book, The Education of Negroes in New Jersey and to her full body of scholarly work. First published in 1941 by Teachers College Press, Thompson’s landmark study has been out of print for decades. Such rarity understates the book’s importance. Thompson’s major book and her life are significant for the histories of New Jersey, African Americans, local and national, women’s and education history. Drawing upon Wright's work, existing scholarship, and new archival research, this new landmark scholarly edition, which includes an all-new biography of this pioneering scholar, underscores the continued relevance of Marion Thompson Wright.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Dec 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978805385

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Cover Page for The Marion Thompson Wright Reader

The Marion Thompson Wright Reader

The Marion Thompson Wright Reader

Edited and with a Biographical Introduction by Graham Russell Gao Hodges

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wright, Marion Manola Thompson, 1904–1962, author. | Hodges, Graham Russell, 1946– editor.

Title: The Marion Thompson Wright reader / edited and with a biographical introduction by Graham Russell Gao Hodges.

Description: New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021006613 | ISBN 9781978805361 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978805378 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978805385 (epub) | ISBN 9781978805392 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978805408 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Education—History. | Discrimination in education—United States—History. | Segregation in education—United States—History.

Classification: LCC LC2741 .W75 2022 | DDC 371.829/96073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006613

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2022 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Introduction and scholarly apparatus copyright © 2022 by Graham Russell Gao Hodges

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

What would you have done in the same circumstances?

—Marion Thompson Wright to her son James Allen Moss, ca. 1939

Contents

Biographical Introduction

The Education of Negroes in New Jersey

ESSAYS

New Jersey Laws and the Negro. Journal of Negro History 28, no. 2 (April 1943): 156–199.

Negro Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1875. Journal of Negro History 33, no. 2 (April 1948): 168–224.

Chapter IX from Racial Integration in the Public Schools of New Jersey. In Next Steps in Racial Desegregation in Education. Special issue, Journal of Negro Education 23, no. 3 (Summer 1954): 282–289.

REVIEWS AND NOTES

Are Colonials People? Review of Color and Democracy, by William E. Burghardt Du Bois. Journal of Negro Education 15, no. 1 (Winter 1946): 63–65.

It Can Happen Anywhere. Review of If He Hollers, Let Him Go, by Chester B. Himes. Journal of Negro Education 15, no. 2 (Spring 1946): 213–214.

Notes from Recent Books. Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 4 (Autumn 1944): 532–535.

Notes from Recent Books. Journal of Negro Education 18, no. 2 (Spring 1949): 155–159.

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRY

Lucy Diggs Slowe. In Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Edward T. James et al., 3:299–300. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971.

Chronological Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Contributors

Biographical Introduction

The Marion Thompson Wright Reader offers some of the best work by one of New Jersey’s finest historians and the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in the discipline of history. Marion Thompson Wright’s book, The Education of Negroes in New Jersey, is the centerpiece of this collection and is joined by her award-winning essays from the Journal of Negro History and the Journal of Negro Education (JNE), selected reviews and notes from her decades as the editor of book reviews for the JNE, and a significant encyclopedia entry she composed about her mentor Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first Dean of Women at Howard University. A complete bibliography of her work appears at the end of the collection.

This introduction provides a concise biography of Wright, using sources from newspapers, academic studies, accounts of friends and colleagues, and material graciously provided by her descendants. Despite the tragic end to her life, Marion Thompson Wright exemplified the committed Black female intellectual of her time. She firmly believed that African American society, especially its organizations, had much to contribute to the greater democratization of society and toward the lessening of the harsh racism that hindered all Black Americans of her time. That her personal life was sorrowful does not undercut her massive, constant efforts to better the lives of her people and of America.

Marion Thompson Wright (1902–1962) was the first Black woman to earn a doctorate in the discipline of history. Her book The Education of Negroes in New Jersey, published by Columbia University/Teachers College Press in 1941, remains a landmark study. In the book and in many articles and reviews published during her career as a professor of education at Howard University from 1940 to 1962, Wright sustained an unceasing argument that showed how the roots of racism and slavery lay deep and wide in the American past. More optimistically, she highlighted the positive efforts of Black and white activists who pushed for racially integrated education. From her 1928 Howard University MA thesis comparing white and Black educational systems in sixteen states through her acclaimed doctoral dissertation and subsequent scholarly articles written during her career, Marion Wright anticipated the recent argument of legal scholar Justin Driver that the public school has served as the single most significant site of constitutional decision making within the nation’s history.¹ That faith and effort are reflected in Wright’s important research for the campaign that peaked in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Wright was one of the first Black female academics. This recovery of Marion Thompson Wright’s life and legacy fits into a renewed interest in the careers of Black female intellectuals during the era when Jim Crow America haltingly changed into a quasi-integrated society between 1940 and 1963.² After Wright’s death in 1962, her Howard University Department of Education colleague Walter Daniel published a valuable remembrance of her in the Journal of Negro Education. In the early 1980s, historians Clement Price and Giles Wright established a lectureship in her name, which continues to the present day. During the 1990s, Margaret Crocco, a historian of education, composed two fine book chapters comparing Wright with Mary Ritter Beard, one of the giants of women’s history, and with Elizabeth Amira Allen, a New Jersey educator.³

Wright was a dedicated professor, loving yet rigorous toward her students, and an excellent university citizen. Zachery R. Williams portrays male professors at Howard University as dedicated public intellectuals who worked well with political and philanthropic organizations, created accessible scholarship, and had a sizable impact on their society.⁴ Marion Thompson Wright displayed similar public talents through her lectures and writings. She served on numerous committees at Howard University and designed a student guidance system while teaching a full load.

Deborah Gray White has noted that Wright’s ordeal underscores Black women’s difficulties at American universities and colleges. Wright studied at Howard University from 1923 to 1928, taught there from 1928 to 1931, returned as an instructor in 1939, and by 1940, became one of two female assistant professors in the College of Liberal Arts and the only member of the education department with a doctorate. She earned tenure in 1946, was promoted to full professor in 1950, and taught there until her death in 1962. As her son, Professor James Allen Moss, argued in a compelling speech at the Marion Thompson Wright lecture in 1989, attention should be given to her personal strength in the face of intense emotional trauma and pain.⁵

Marion Thompson Wright had deep personal sorrows. She presented herself in 1923 to Howard University as a single woman named Marion Thompson and maintained that identity until her marriage to Arthur Wright in 1931. In fact, while in high school in Newark, she had married and birthed two children with William Moss, a local laborer. Wright concealed her past in order to succeed at Howard University, a deception that inflicted deep wounds on her family and herself. Wright was estranged from her two children, James and Thelma Moss, until long into their adulthood. This book charts how Wright and her children strived to sustain family contact as powerful social forces kept them apart. At the same time, Marion Thompson Wright made choices about creating her own freedom. To create her freer life, Marion Thompson Wright employed what Angela Davis called a radical imagination, for which a fundamental requirement is believing that the world you want to come into existence can happen. I think that that is how Black folks have engaged with and invested in and articulated freedom, as an ideal and as an everyday practice. Wright’s radical imagination created chances and dangers that remain with us today.⁶

Marion Manola Thompson was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on September 13, 1902, the daughter of Moses R. Thompson and Minnie B. Holmes Thompson, both born in Virginia. Minnie Thompson was born in 1879, the daughter and youngest child of Thomas and Mary Holmes of Port Royal, Caroline County, Virginia. Thomas Holmes, a farm laborer, was born in 1835 and was enslaved by J. T. Martin of Port Royal. Mary Holmes was born in 1847 and was enslaved by William Jourdan from the same village. Thomas and Mary Holmes cohabited in 1861 and were likely freed by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The couple birthed six children, several of whom moved north to the Newark, New Jersey, area while the parents stayed in Port Royal. Minnie came north in the early years of the Great Migration and was listed in 1900 as a servant working for the family of William and Elizabeth Worth of West Orange, New Jersey. She had doubtless left Port Royal to escape Jim Crow restrictions, only to find that domestic work, with its clear descent from slavery, was the only work she could get in New Jersey.⁷

Within two years of her arrival north, Minnie Holmes married Moses R. Thompson, aged thirty-one, listed variously as a laborer, an express man, and a driver. Moses R. Thompson was from Richmond, Virginia, born March 17, 1871, the seventh child of twelve birthed by Jonathan and Sophia A. Thompson. After several postemancipation decades in which Blacks made economic and social gains, the city of Richmond was slipping into Jim Crow, making it unattractive for a young Black man. The family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, sometime in the 1890s. After Jonathan Thompson died, his family lived in Vermont before settling in Newark, New Jersey. Sophia Thompson remarried to a barber and opened a restaurant. Like his wife, Moses Thompson had a sizable number of siblings living around Newark.⁸

Minnie Thompson left her West Orange job after the birth of her first child but returned to other domestic toils later. She named her first child after Marion Manola, a popular contemporary light opera star, who lived with her husband, John B. Mason, in Orange, New Jersey. It is possible that either Minnie or Moses Thompson worked for the famed couple. In the next few years, the Thompson family grew with the birth of Arnold, a son, in 1907 and twin girls, Thelma and Gladys, in 1909. During those years, the family moved often between Newark and Orange, spending no more than two years in any rental home.⁹

Sometime between 1910 and 1915, the family broke up. The New Jersey state census of 1915 recorded Marion Thompson as living with relatives Charles H. and Mary F. Thompson. Her sisters went to Port Royal to live with their grandparents. After a year, Charles and Mary Thompson moved away, and Marion Thompson returned to her mother’s residence. Marion’s brother, Arnold, lived with an uncle and his wife and family, James A. and Frances Holmes, in nearby Cranbury. Arnold was still there at the age of twenty-three in 1930. After the breakup, Moses Thompson seems not to have had much of a role in his children’s lives, though he did remain in the area. For young Marion Thompson, the loss of her father in her preteen years created an abiding loneliness and a sense of unworthiness. Often such a loss meant deep anxieties about losing further relationships. For Marion Thompson, it seems to have created a hard shell protecting a deep hurt, joined by a willingness to inflict her pain on others. Depression stemming from the breakup took some time to manifest, but it ultimately plagued Marion Thompson.¹⁰

More hurt came from her grandfather’s death. Minnie Holmes Thompson suffered the loss of her father, who died in Virginia in 1919. Her parents, who had remained in Port Royal, Caroline County, Virginia, had been married fifty-seven years. Minnie Holmes’s family, in contrast to her parents’, lasted about a decade before a bitter estrangement. The move north resulted in disappointments that surely affected the mother-daughter conversations about marriage.¹¹

Avon Avenue School, Newark, 1905, public domain.

Marion Thompson found succor at school. As she pointed out in her book, The Education of Negroes in New Jersey, public education in northern New Jersey was integrated, at least to the extent that some Blacks were admitted to better quality white public schools. She first attended the well-equipped and designed Avon Avenue Public Elementary School, where she was among the first students in the school after its opening in 1906. She then matriculated at Barringer High School in September 1916. She excelled in her college preparatory curriculum until she abruptly dropped out in December 1918.¹²

On December 18, 1918, Marion Thompson married William Henry Moss of Montclair in New York City. William Moss was his wife’s age; his occupation was listed as kitchen man. William Moss left school after the eighth grade. Marion Moss’s occupation was listed as nanny, indicating that she was already working while in school. The young couple had to obtain parental consent to marry because they were under twenty-one years of age. The fact that the marriage ceremony occurred in New York City rather than Newark indicates a desire to keep the event secret.¹³

The reason for the hasty marriage became apparent on January 2, 1919, when their daughter, Thelma Mae Moss, was born. Within six months, Marion Wright was pregnant again, giving birth to a son, James Allen Moss, on March 27, 1920. The couple moved around Newark, finally settling at 17 Crawford Street. Unsurprisingly, their low-level jobs and the burdens of parenting as young adults created tensions. Economic opportunities for young Blacks in Newark were very poor. Clement Price’s analysis of census records indicates that Black males typically worked as porters, as laborers, and at other unskilled jobs. In 1910, for example, there were 311 Black delivery men in Newark compared with three African American store clerks. Marion Thompson would need luck to achieve as much as her mother, who worked as a housekeeper for prominent Montclair families. Such jobs were hard to get and maintain. Commuting while caring for infant children posed a significant problem for Marion Thompson. Her likely future lay was as a laundrywoman, the job for 684 Black women in Newark, compared with just 27 housekeepers or stewardesses. Moreover, Newark’s inner city was changing rapidly. In her childhood, Marion Thompson interacted with Germans, the Irish, Poles, and other Blacks. By 1915, the arrival of sizable numbers of Black migrants from the southern United States made the city more crowded. Newark landlords did not hesitate to carve older homes into small apartments and neglect repairs. Her neighborhood was becoming a ghetto for the very poor with increased competition for the lowest-paid jobs.¹⁴

Newark (Barringer) High School, ca. 1910, collection of the author.

The young couple quarreled about Marion Moss’s ambitions and her treatment of the children. On a Sunday afternoon in October 1921, Marion Moss gathered together her clothing and other possessions and disappeared. William Moss believed that she went to her mother’s home at 50 Thomas Street, though he could not find her when he went searching for her. Family lore tells that Minnie Thompson was deeply influential in her daughter’s decision to leave her husband. At one point, William Moss spotted his wife in a crowd at Lincoln Park. Moss beseeched his wife to come back, but she finally said she could not be bothered with the responsibility of children.¹⁵

Mothers who consciously abandon their children are highly unusual in Western society. Enslaved women in America occasionally left their children in search of freedom. Harriet Jacobs and Mary Walker were among the Black women who deserted their children in desperate bursts for freedom from slavery and sexual abuse. Both, however, spent years later striving to regain contact. Their circumstances, including flight from slavery and rape, contrast sharply with Marion Thompson’s. She fled her family to pursue the finest education available to Black Americans of the time. Marion Thompson’s iron rod of ambition overrode her maternal instincts.¹⁶

After she dropped her married name, Marion Thompson devoted her energies to her education. Encouraged by a guidance counselor and by her mother, Thompson returned to Newark High in January 1922 after an absence of over two years. She focused on a liberal arts curriculum, taking required courses each year in English, math, history, science, and physical education with electives in Latin and German. She also took skills courses in sewing and cooking. To make up her courses more quickly, she also studied evenings at Drake’s College, a nearby business school. Thompson threw herself into high school activities, serving on the board of the Epilogue and the Acropolis, the student magazines, and joining the science and glee clubs. Most of these activities were for upper-class students; her participation indicated how involved she was with high school and how openly her fellow students accepted her. Her nickname was M. T., and her motto was Deeds Survive the Doer, a prescient forecast of her life. Generally, her classmates seem to have supported her, but she complained in a letter written years later of the high school slurs and innuendos about her perceived status as a loose woman. The school’s administration must have collaborated with her to keep her status secret from any potential colleges, at which married women and/or mothers were rarely welcome. Marion Thompson graduated on June 21, 1923, with a diploma in General Latin. There are reports that Thompson was the top student at Newark High School in her class year. At that time, the school did not list a valedictorian or salutatorian in its graduation ceremonies. She did appear in several semester honor roles but was absent in a few others. Suffice to say, she was an excellent student.¹⁷

Marion Thompson Wright high school graduation photo, courtesy of the Barringer High School Archives.

Marion Thompson’s college prospects were propitious. Newark High School was a first-rate secondary institution. White male graduates routinely entered Princeton, Harvard, and other Ivy League schools; white women went on to the top female colleges. The other two Black students in Thompson’s class, both males, enrolled at Rutgers. Marion Thompson, however, was intent upon matriculating at Howard University, the capstone of African American universities. There was a major obstacle: Howard University did not accept married women or women with children.¹⁸

William Henry Pop Moss, courtesy of Gabriel Bacchus.

While Marion Thompson pursued her ambitions, William Moss struggled to care for their children. He moved several times, then finally boarded the children out by the week while he lived with his brother at 140 Broome Street. William Moss learned that his wife had enrolled at Howard University and was living in a dormitory under her maiden name. He wrote her a registered letter asking her to return home and help raise the children. In her reply, Thompson wrote she was willing and shall do all I can for the children but that coming back was utterly impossible. It would not be best, she explained, for the children to live in a home where no affection or respect exists between the parents. Any love, Thompson declared, that she felt toward William died long ago. If he did not understand that before, Thompson sharply pointed out, that . . . is clear to you now. She was willing to talk to Moss about the children, but any hopes for reconciliation I absolutely refuse now and for all future times. Several neighbors supported Moss’s claims about his wife’s neglect of the children and desertion of the family home. Thompson did not dispute any of these assertions; her silence indicates that she simply wanted to be free of her family. On September 21, 1925, William Moss was granted an uncontested divorce from Marion Thompson and given full custody of the children. On December 2, 1925, he remarried in New York City to Lula Moody, a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Virginia with a single child.¹⁹

In the record of the divorce proceedings, Marion Thompson comes across as heartless and indifferent to her family. Likely her parents’ breakup instilled in her the impermanence of family; the allures of high school intellectual stimulation and enjoyable extracurricular activities made the grind of early childhood parenting even less desirable. An intelligent young woman, Thompson examined her surroundings and realized the dim prospects for a woman with two children and no high school diploma. Newark’s school system may have been integrated but its workforce was not. Jim Crow discrimination hardened in New Jersey after World War I. Professional work for Black men was becoming rarer. New Jersey’s former governor, and now president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson had pushed to evict Blacks from federal civil service, discrimination that was soon emulated by state governments. Most Black men were laborers; even those with industrial jobs toiled at the bottom of the ladder with no chances for upward mobility. For a woman such as Marion Thompson, poorly paid and demeaning work as the servant of white people, a status directly descended from slavery, was her likely future. Her mother, only a generation removed from actual slavery and having toiled in such slavish work, surely warned her daughter against it. Her husband, William Moss, as an unskilled high school dropout, offered few advantages. Leaving her family to resume her studies was a harsh but existential choice. Her long-term success partially validated her decision yet foreshadowed the terrible life decisions professional women have had to make to the present day. As a lower-class female, Thompson’s determination resembles the brave social experiments other urban, Black women chose in this era. Dedicated ambition, especially for female academics, rarely coincides with family happiness. Those women who have it all with professional and domestic satisfaction are rare. Studies have indicated that the bulk of high-achieving, academic women either never marry or have childless marriages.²⁰ Marion could not know of those statistics and a scholarly career was only a dream, but she knew that school offered personal joy. Home did not. Had Marion Thompson chosen to stay with her family, there is no guarantee that life would have worked out for the best. As Saidiya Hartman has recently demonstrated, the early twentieth century was a time of sexual experimentation for young Black women and sometimes included dangerous risk-taking.²¹

Wright recalled that when she and Moss Sr. parted ways, she had nothing and could do nothing. She credited her mother, Minnie, for getting her back into school. A study made a century later, but with direct application, indicates the impact single Black mothers had on their college-bound daughters. Minnie Thompson may not have used the exact words, but later a young Black woman told an interviewer, My mother was always in my head. Single Black mothers advised their daughters that a man was not necessary to succeed, words that Marion Thompson took to heart. Indeed, choices had to be made. High schools frowned on married women being in class, and she did not want to parade my troubles to the school public. As the sole woman of color in her graduating class, Marion Thompson doubtless felt particularly anxious about appearances. The same was true for college. Her status would have been an object of discussion and what not. She would not have been permitted to live in a dormitory. As a divorced woman, she was already the target of so many insulting proposals from men as to be nauseating, personal assaults that I got my fill of while finishing high school.²²

Her decision came with immense personal cost. Divorce was a heavy burden for all women, especially Blacks, and indicated a family failure that was painful to explain. Accordingly, Black women, Thompson included, had to engage in acts of dissemblance to disguise or conceal past marital problems. One primary reason was that divorced women were considered more sexually experienced and available to predatory males. For poorer women such as Thompson, divorce could mean falling through social cracks.²³

Thompson’s act of deception and its costs may be understood by borrowing a metaphor from Nella Larsen’s Passing, published in 1929. Marion Thompson dissembled or passed as a single, childless young woman. She shaved three years off her age, dropped her husband’s name, and matriculated at Howard ostensibly as a sexually innocent, unmarried, childless young woman, seemingly identical to other female students. Marion Thompson had to maintain secrecy about her family, an act that haunted her for the rest of her life. Whereas most of her Howard University classmates came from middle- or upper-class Black families in which a college education was expected, Thompson’s family was working class at best and poorly educated (she was the only one of her siblings to graduate from high school).²⁴ As she moved on up from high school to a prestigious college, Marion Thompson climbed out of an impoverished, broken home; found a successful pathway through education; and was poised to better herself as much as a Black woman in a Jim Crow society could do. She was also the mother of two by the age of eighteen and was estranged from her husband and infant children. Her success was happening at an immense personal cost.

HOWARD UNIVERSITY, 1923–1932

Marion Thompson’s top-notch academic record prompted Howard University to admit her with a scholarship on October 4, 1922, during the fall of her senior year of high school. Using her maiden name and forsaking all references to her husband and children, Marion Thompson enrolled at Howard University in the fall of 1923. Dean Dwight Oliver Wendell Holmes and registrar Fred D. Wilkinson recalled her as a first-year student who was regular in attendance, conscientious in the performance of duty, and mentally alert. Holmes, later president of Morgan College (now Morgan State University), regarded Thompson with the tolerance he displayed toward Zora Neale Hurston, who arrived at the school two years before. Hurston dissembled by lowering her age ten years to enroll at Howard University. Hurston realized that Holmes saw through her deceptions but silently conveyed an understanding that now that she was at Howard, she should make the most of it.²⁵

Thompson arrived as Howard University was going through major changes. The student population had soared in the previous few years. Student unrest over mandatory ROTC meetings and poor faculty relations with the president of the university, J. Stanley Durkee, led eventually to his resignation in 1926. Later in her career, Marion Thompson Wright commented that the students were testing the limits, seeking to become a potent force in school governance.²⁶

Replacing Durkee, the last white chief executive of the school, was Mordecai Johnson, a renowned African American Baptist minister. Johnson immediately worked to improve federal funding for Howard and to lift its research profile by hiring eminent Black professors. The selection of a Black man initially enthused students and faculty; soon, however, Johnson’s autocratic methods dismayed his early supporters. Nonetheless, he stayed in office until 1960, nearly matching Wright’s entire tenure at the school.²⁷

As she enrolled at Howard University, it was impossible for Marion Thompson to keep her past life secret. A Howard University classmate met James Moss Sr., who told him of their marriage. She related, The fellow realized what I was doing and said nothing about it. Still, rumors abounded at Howard: I did not know she was married. Mudslingers implied that both children were illegitimate. Instead of telling the world of her failed marriage, Marion Thompson decided to get along. The court had given Moss Sr. full custody of the children; Marion Thompson felt everything was settled without my being in the future. . . . I then set up my goals and worked toward them.²⁸

Anxious that her past might be revealed, Thompson strived to remain obscure at the onset of her college career. She was especially concerned about attracting the attention of Lucy Diggs Slowe, who had punctuated the first year of her illustrious career as Howard’s inaugural Dean of Women by suspending three female students. Marion Thompson’s efforts to lay low ended when, upon returning one day to her dorm room, she found a note advising her that Slowe wanted to see her. The frightened and puzzled young woman wondered what on earth had she done to merit such an invitation. The next twenty-four hours were torture. When Thompson appeared at Slowe’s office, she learned to her relief that the dean merely wanted to meet her, as she did with other female students.²⁹

Lucy Diggs Slowe quickly enlisted Thompson in leadership activities. Slowe advocated for activities and role models that would prepare Black women for leadership, a quality that she found sadly lacking at the patriarchal Black college. Slowe demanded from a recalcitrant Johnson and other officials at Howard University that women be able to serve on university councils and have their own dormitories and that the school establish counseling services for female students.³⁰ Slowe already was establishing herself as a national leader. Washington, D.C., and Howard University were exciting places for a young woman of color, despite local, tightening segregation and acceptance of the Ku Klux Klan at the highest levels of government. Slowe was part of the New Negro Womanhood that emphasized voluntarism, club membership, leadership in social affairs, activism toward universal suffrage, and the democratic promise of education for all Black people. Slowe was concerned that Black female graduates were unduly directed into teaching and sought to establish a guidance program that would open young, educated women to broader prospects, themes that Wright would echo throughout her career.³¹

Guided by Slowe, Marion Thompson plunged into Howard activities. By the autumn of her sophomore year, she had been elected to the Howard University student council and served as recording secretary for her class. She was named an honor student at the annual campus convocation and in 1925 was elected to Kappa Mu, Howard University’s academic honor society.³² As a junior, Thompson became president of the newly formed Women’s League at Howard. The Women’s League represented the university at the annual National Student Conference, lent support to the Howard football team, and hosted annual candlelight services at the last vesper service before Christmas. The league set up a loan fund for needy female students and sponsored an annual May Festival.³³

Slowe formed the Women’s League as the prototype of the National Council of College Women (NCCW) on the Howard campus in 1923, one of the first and most important female organizations. The NCCW was dedicated to shaping women’s leadership and improving society. Within a few years, the NCCW had chapters across the nation. The NCCW rapidly politicized, making appeals to President Calvin Coolidge for clemency for a condemned Black prisoner, lobbying congressmen for better treatment of Haiti, striving with congress for improved education for Blacks, endorsing the antilynching bill, and later offering support in the 1930s for President Franklin Roosevelt’s economic recovery program.³⁴

Marion Thompson joined Delta Sigma Theta, a Black sorority founded on the Howard campus in 1913. Noted early on for its extravagant balls and banquets, which were intended to foster community and sisterhood among its members, Delta Theta Sigma held a May Week that included public programs, plays, cultural teas, guest lecturers, scholarship awards, and group singing. By 1925 when Marion Thompson became a member, Delta Theta Sigma embraced social activism and issued its first public denunciations against racism. By the time of her graduation, the sorority had taken on a directly political position, organizing marches in support of female suffrage and increased Black rights. Membership in Delta Sigma Theta lasted a lifetime. Even so, Marion Thompson’s situation at Howard was never secure. Someone tried unsuccessfully to use information about her past life to keep Thompson out of the sorority.³⁵

Joining Delta Sigma Theta and being at Howard University meant partaking in a rich social life. Washington, D.C., was the national center for Black professionals, politicians, and prosperous families. The commercial and cultural center of Black Washington was around U Street, with its stores, restaurants, movie houses, and theaters. After inexpensive shows at either the Lincoln or Republic Theatres, patrons could pass down the alley by the Lincoln, enter its basement, and dance at the Lincoln Colonnade, the city’s most expansive dance hall. U Street was the home of important Black churches, the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, the Twelfth Street YMCA, the Odd Fellows Lodge, the Masonic Temple, the Industrial Savings Bank, and Scurlock’s Photo Studio (the official photographer for Howard University). Nearby Seventh Street was a more downscale, sensualized version of U Street. Other areas were more bourgeois. Neighborhoods adjacent to the campus, such as Shaw, Striver’s Row, and Le Droit Park, were the homes of the city’s Black professionals and educators, including Howard University administrators and faculty.³⁶

In their study of the city’s Black labor force, Lorenzo Greene and Myra Colson Callis found that the city’s unemployment level in 1930 was the smallest of any large city in the United States. Washington, D.C., depended on employment in the government sector rather than in big industry, where unskilled and semiskilled workers of both races had lost jobs across the country. While Black Washingtonians lost work generally, local firms and industries—including dairy, welding, laundry, wholesale grocery, newspapers, chain stores, and wrecking companies—employed white and Black workers. Blacks tended to hold only lower-paid, unskilled jobs in these sectors, while whites held managerial or better-paid staff positions. Lest Marion Wright forget her past, the difficulty for Black women to gain even domestic jobs in the city would be a reminder of what her dedication to education and respectability had allowed her to escape.³⁷

Inscription from Langston Hughes to Marion Thompson, courtesy of Marion Thompson Wright Collection 0177, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.

Marion Thompson developed her own circuit of friends. She was among the revelers at the annual Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity reception at a local casino in late 1924. As a Howard University undergraduate, her social itinerary merited inclusion in national Black newspapers. In 1924, the Pittsburgh Courier reported twice on her visits to Newark, Atlantic City, and New York City in August and October 1928.³⁸

As head of the Women’s League, an organization newly formed by Slowe, Thompson and Mabel Holloway were selected to represent Howard at the 1925 National Collegiate World Court conference held at Princeton University. As Thompson recorded the event for the newspaper, the conference elected Mabel Holloway to represent the entire southern region of the nation on the seven-person executive committee. Two white students objected, based on Howard’s location and her race. Marion Thompson was considered as well but did not qualify because of her geographical origins. After a heated debate and prayers in which the vast majority of white students supported her, Holloway was seated despite the racists’ objections. She and Thompson returned to Howard praising the association and noting that democracy could work.³⁹

There were other attractions at Howard University. As the African American national university, Howard University was a must-visit for top Black scholars and writers. Langston Hughes visited Howard University in 1926. Starting a hobby of collecting signed first editions, Marion Thompson got Hughes to inscribe her copy of The Weary Blues. Dated February 6, 1926, the occasion was likely one in which Marion Thompson met Hughes as an organizational leader. Thompson obtained other signed Hughes works in the future. She devised a personal bookplate that resembled a library checkout folder, asking any who borrowed from her collection to please return it. Earlier, she had enlisted friends to help her obtain signed copies. Glenn, a friend, got Countee Cullen to autograph his path-breaking debut, Color, in New York City on December 20, 1925.⁴⁰

Washington, D.C., held other attractions for young female undergraduates. A center of the New Negro Woman movement, the town’s Black culture moved from a politics of respectability toward greater individual expression. There were numerous hair salons to attract Marion Thompson, whose photographs display a careful attention to her hair. Nannie Helen Burroughs, founder of the National Training School for Girls and Women, advocated feminine propriety and Black style in bodily presentation but rejected practices of hair straightening and skin lightening. Washington political leader Mary Church Terrell advocated the joys of Black female artifice in hair design and accepted the realities of African American stylization. As this photograph indicates, Marion Thompson combined stylish clothing with straightened hair.⁴¹

While the 1920s were a new era for personal sexual self-expression, older attitudes about Black uplift and strict morality prevailed in proper Washington Black society. Young Black undergraduate women were expected to be moral and feminine beyond any feminist goals. Personal chastity was the litmus test for a young woman’s reputation and served as a class and cultural wedge between middle-class college women and the masses of poorer Black females. Black female club women, who were from the class to which Thompson aspired, urged higher levels of morality, in part to retain the respect of Black men. As someone who had emerged from impoverished circumstances and had a secret life of a past marriage and children, Thompson’s daily existence was filled with constant anxiety over discovery of her Newark life. Open revelations about her past would spur condemnation from the school president and likely from her peers. Expulsion and shunning would surely follow.⁴²

Clothing was another marker of class difference. Despite public disapproval of the parade of dances, parties, teas, and other social affairs, Black women had trouble keeping up with the demands of fashion. At Howard University, undergraduate women expected to spend over five hundred dollars annually on clothing, which amounted to nearly a working person’s yearly earnings. Marion Thompson would have to walk a fine line between being fashionable and falling into debt.⁴³

Dean Slowe was an invaluable ally. Under Slowe’s guidance and following the example of upper-class women who had helped her, Marion Thompson began mentoring younger female students. Her benevolent desire almost led to disaster. There was an opening in the personnel office to replace someone absent for a term. An anonymous letter to Thompson threatened exposure to the president of the school, the conservative Mordecai Johnson, and to Lucy Slowe, the Dean of Women, if she accepted the position. Distressed, Thompson broke her silence and told Slowe her secrets. Slowe asked Thompson to produce the marriage license and divorce. After she viewed the documents, Slowe told Thompson to say nothing further about it. The immediate problem dissolved when the friend for whom she was to substitute changed plans and canceled the leave.

Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe, 1929, courtesy of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

Once that danger eased, Thompson began to expand her mentoring. She directed a younger student, Selma White Palmer, to work with the famous minister Rev. John Clarence Wright of the First Congregational Church of Atlanta so that Palmer could earn a degree in social work. Rev. Wright was also the brother of Arthur M. Wright of Newark, whom Marion Thompson was dating at the time. Selma White Palmer and Marion Thompson remained close friends throughout life. After Selma’s first marriage failed, she turned to Thompson for succor and lived with her to regain personal stability. When Marion Thompson was a graduate student, she took an interest in Theodora Daniel, later wife of Walter G. Daniel, who became one of Wright’s closest colleagues in Howard University’s education department. Theodora Daniel recalled Thompson’s role as an instructor in educational sociology as imaginative and interpretive. Theodora Daniel remembered Thompson as having very high standards, a strong sense of purpose, and expected the very best of her students. After her marriage to Walter, Theodora Daniel and Marion Thompson Wright remained close friends and took lengthy trips together. Marion Thompson worked with male students as well. She provided financial assistance to Dr. Elias Blake, who later headed the counseling service she initiated in 1946. She was known as a big sister to Carroll Miller, later chair of the education department, and a close friend of Wright’s. Decades later, Miller tried to complete Wright’s manuscript on Lucy Diggs Slowe. While his death prevented finishing the book, he is listed as a coauthor.⁴⁴

Marion Thompson, Bison Yearbook, 1927, courtesy of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

Marion Thompson graduated from Howard University magna cum laude in 1927. Her yearbook epigram reflected her powerful relationship with her mother: All That I Am, or Hope to Be, I owe to My Mother.⁴⁵ After graduation from Howard University, Marion Thompson could easily have found employment as a school teacher in a Black school anywhere in the United States. While teaching was the overwhelming destination for college-educated Black women, there were reasons not to choose this path. Black teachers were underpaid, worked in difficult conditions, had little or no contact with their white counterparts, seldom married, and were often resented by poorer Blacks. White-dominated schools in New Jersey rarely hired Blacks, male or female, to teach white children.⁴⁶

Marion Thompson remained at Howard University after she received a fellowship for a master’s degree in education. Charles Thompson (no relation), dean of the School of Education at Howard, encouraged her scholarship. Recruited by Dwight Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Thompson ascended to full professor in just three years. He was noted for encouraging female scholars. As a graduate student, Marion Thompson continued to work with Howard students, organizing the Pestalozzi-Froebel Society for undergraduates studying education. The society supported kindergarten for all. Marion Thompson received an MA degree in June 1928.⁴⁷

Earning an advanced degree in educational studies at Howard University was a significant achievement. Charles Thompson was publishing important articles in prestigious journals, organizing tight networks of like-minded scholars, and pushing the benefits of integrated education. He had garnered sizable fame for his 1928 article The Educational Achievements of Negro Children, which appeared in the prestigious Annals of the American Academy of Science. His thesis that Black children were not inherently inferior to white children but that their mental and scholastic achievements were a direct function of their educational and environmental opportunities was a landmark finding.⁴⁸

Charles H. Thompson, courtesy of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

Marion Thompson’s MA thesis carried the weighty title of A Comparative Study of the Efficiency of Public White and Colored State School Systems in Sixteen States. Replete with twenty-three full-page tables, the work is a quantified tour de force. After exhaustively reviewing past efforts to understand the values of the parallel systems,⁴⁹ Thompson studied their comparative values using statistics provided by state boards of education, the United States Census Bureau, and state superintendents of education. Some agencies responded that most states did not keep separate accounts for white and Black schools.⁵⁰

Thompson’s tables on school enrollment, school attendance, school terms, high school attendance, the number of teachers per student, and teacher salaries are dense forests of data. Ultimately, she found that only in West Virginia were Black schools more efficient than white. Tabulating data from 1920 to 1926, Thompson concluded that the colored schools are inferior to the white school systems, and that these disparities were actually increasing, placing colored children . . . at an even greater disadvantage than they were before the World War [I]. Composed decades before the NAACP’s ambitious strategy aimed at dismantling separate but equal schools, Thompson’s MA thesis demonstrated her qualities as a scholar with sizable talents and energy and with a clear agenda in place. She would use those skills again and again in the coming years.⁵¹

With her advanced degree, Thompson joined an elite group of Black women. At the same time, social maladjustment accompanied higher education. Marion Cuthbert, who was in was in the doctoral program at Columbia around the same time as Thompson, wrote a dissertation on marginality and educated Black women. Cuthbert discovered that educated Black women faced a number of social obstacles. Other members of Black society often regarded them as snobby, selfish, and clannish. They were often criticized for failing to help advance the race, though Thompson overcompensated for that concern. Educated Black women faced racial barriers for employment and were paid far less than their white counterparts. An educated Black woman had to assume total responsibility for her family. Despite such contributions, husbands and other Black men harbored antagonisms. The Black community at large was either indifferent or even resentful of educated Black women. At elite schools such as Columbia University, Black women faced segregation, stereotyping, and invisibility.⁵²

At the same time, there were benefits for educated Black women. Degrees reflected personal desires and raised their own and their family’s status. As was the case with educated, white females, there were fewer children. Interracial contacts could be problematic and racist, but occasionally whites could be warm and supportive. Educated Black women were more race-conscious and lived between two worlds: the Black community and the larger white world. Cuthbert did not identify sexism and patriarchy as underlying problems, as a scholar would today, but viewed educated Black women as leaders in racial and interracial work.⁵³

Staying at Howard University confounded Thompson’s personal dilemma. Had she taken a job in New Jersey, she might have reconciled with her children. To help fund her studies, Howard University awarded her work as a residence counselor, with teaching duties and supervision of female students. Had President Mordecai Johnson learned of the existence of a secret family, Marion would surely have lost her job and all future contact with Howard University. As her son James put it, Things just closed in after that; she never found a way out.⁵⁴ After earning a master’s degree, Marion Thompson became an instructor in Howard’s education department and enrolled in a program for teachers at Columbia University in the summer of 1929.⁵⁵

Marion Thompson ended her college years when, identified as Marion Manola Thompson, she married Arthur Wright on April 3, 1931, in Alexandria, Virginia. Arthur Wright, a Howard University graduate, was a postal worker from Newark, seventeen years older than his new wife, and had been previously married. They had appeared socially at least since 1926. Five years is a lengthy courtship, but Marion Thompson put her education and career ahead of romance. The couple took up residence in Newark that year.⁵⁶

Back in Newark with her new husband, Marion Thompson Wright could look back upon her eight years at Howard with much satisfaction. She had earned a BA and MA with high distinction and had become a leading campus figure with memberships in key women’s and general student organizations. She had gained several powerful mentors, including Dwight Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lucy Diggs Slowe, and Charles Thompson. Despite her second marriage, the wounds from her first marriage and her relationship with her children remained deeply unresolved. New affections had not unlocked the iron box around her soul.

Newark, New Jersey, had changed in the eight years since Marion Thompson Wright had last been a full-time resident. The Black population had grown substantially from nine thousand in 1910 to nearly thirty-nine thousand in 1930. Housing segregation replaced older integrated neighborhoods. Despite this increase, largely fueled by migration from the South, skilled opportunities for Blacks in industrial work declined in the 1920s and cratered after the onset of the Great Depression. Work in domestic service or general labor was most common. There were fewer than one hundred Black women in professional positions in Newark in 1930.⁵⁷

Marion Wright found a job in the Newark Department of Welfare then transferred to the New Jersey State Emergency Relief Organization, receiving rapid promotions to become a case supervisor. In 1935, Wright was instrumental in a massive survey of 10,000 New Jersey relief cases by the Emergency Commission. The findings surely taught her how fortunate she was to have completed an education and, sadly, had confirmed her difficult family choices. Newark, as the state’s largest city, accounted for 2,754 examples in the statewide 10,000-family survey. Black men and women with limited education, which included her former husband, William Moss, and Black male laborers and female domestics fared the worst. Egerton Hall’s 1935 examination of Black wage earners in New Jersey likely shored up her convictions that her path, however emotionally fraught, was the right one.⁵⁸ Likely her brilliant research methodology, honed at Howard University, and her dogged persistence and hard work meant that Marion Thompson Wright was able to hold on to her job as a relief investigator even during cutbacks in the employment of Black workers.⁵⁹

During the survey, she met Mabel Carney, professor of rural education at Teachers College of Columbia University. Using substantial grants from the Rosenwald Fund, Carney had enabled over two hundred fifty African Americans in the late