Wright, Louis T. (Louis Tompkins), 1891-1952

Louis Tompkins Wright (1891-1952), son and stepson of physicians, and father to two daughter-physicians, graduated from the Harvard Medical School in 1915. He interned at the Freedman's Hospital, affiliated with Howard Medical School, in Washington, D.C., and then went into practice with his stepfather, Dr. William Fletcher Penn, in Atlanta for a year before joining the Army Medical Corps in 1917. During World War I, he saw service in France and sustained permanent damage to his lungs resulting from a gas attack at Mt. Henri. Returning to civilian life in 1919, Dr. Wright began what was to be a lifelong association with the Surgery Department at Harlem Hospital. He was the first Black to be appointed to the medical staff of a New York hospital, the first to be made director of a department in a non-segregated municipal hospital, and the first to serve as president of a medical board of such a hospital.

But Harlem Hospital was far from integrated when Dr. Wright went to work there. His appointment opened the doors to a recognition of the city hospital system and more especially to the advent of Negro professional personnel into Harlem Hospital. He was an active force in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) efforts as early as 1920 to undermine the unwritten law that barred Negro doctors and nurses from services in New York municipal hospitals. (He would later serve for twenty years as chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors.) In the 1930s, he successfully opposed a proposal of the Julius Rosenwald Fund to erect a segregated hospital in New York. In all ways he fought to foster full and equal opportunity not only in a hospital environment but in the larger community as well.

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