Bruce M. Wright

Bruce McMarion Wright (December 19, 1917 – March 24, 2005) was an American jurist who served on the New York State Supreme Court. Judge Wright is also the father of Geoffrey D.S. Wright a New York State Supreme Court Justice and Keith L.T. Wright a member of the New York State Assembly in New York, United States.

Life

He was born Marion Bruce Wright in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in Princeton, New Jersey. He spent his the majority of his adult life in Harlem, New York. He was awarded a scholarship to attend Princeton University in 1939, but denied admission when the university learned that he was black.^[1] Wright was denied admission to Notre Dame on the same grounds. He studied at Virginia State University, and graduated from Lincoln University, in 1942.^[2]

He served in a U.S. Army, segregated medical unit. He volunteered for combat duty, being assigned to Company K, 16th Infantry Regiment. After World War II, he went AWOL,^[3] making his way to Paris, where he was befriended by Senegalese poet Leopold Senghor, who later became his country's first president.^[4]

Wright’s early ambition was to become a poet and was introduced and later became a friend of Langston Hughes. Wright's first book of poetry, "From the Shaken Tower," was edited by Hughes and published in 1944. He studied at Fordham University Law School, and obtained his law degree from New York Law School.

Mayor John V. Lindsay named him to the NYC Criminal Court bench in 1970. Judge Wright was critical of the judicial system and believed that race and class all too frequently determined the outcome of a trial. Appointed as the General Counsel for the Human Resources Administration in New York City, Wright served as a judge in New York's civil and criminal courts. He was elected to the New York State Supreme Court in 1982 and retired on December 31, 1994.

Justice Wright spent 25 years on the bench in both criminal and civil cases, gaining a reputation as a scholarly and provocative jurist who sprinkled his opinions with literary quotations. He was the author of a 1987 book, Black Robes, White Justice, about the role of race in the judicial system, which won a 1991 American Book Award.^[5] Later he authored his autobiography "Black Justice In A White World."^[6] Judge Wright suffered a heart attack in March 2000 and was made an honorary member of Princeton's 2001 Class, 65 years after his being denied admission because of his race.

Judge Bruce M. Wright denounced what he called racism in the criminal justice system and created a furor in the 1970s by setting low bail for many poor and minority suspects.^[7][8] He earned the nickname "Turn 'em loose Bruce" because of his low bail practices.^[9] In a lecture at Columbia University law school, in 1979, he said that a more appropriate name for him would have been "Civil" Wright. Bruce Wright died in his sleep on March 24, 2005, at his home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut at the age of 87.^[10] His wife, Elizabeth Davidson-Wright, a white woman who accused the family of racism because the family did not like her at all, announced his death after she had Judge Wright cremated without allowing the family to see him first.

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