02/08/2026
Board member, Heather, was recently talking with someone who didn't realize that blacks ever faced discrimination in teaching jobs in Minnesota. The stories of Crystal residents John "Drap" Wright (around 1900), and Martha Wright Wilson (around 1938) prove that's not the only discrimination they faced.
May 19, 1985 Minneapolis Star and Tribune Staff Photo by Steve Schluter
Boyd Wright stood in front of the Wright family home in Crystal. The photo at right, taken about 1946, shows his parents, John Wright and Fannie Hall Wright, at the same residence. Racial ironies follow family of retired postal worker Racism followed him from beginning to end. When he got off ship at Hampton Roads, Va., at the end of the war, he said, a cracker called him a n*****. Then they wouldn't let him eat in a Chinese restaurant.
He returned to Minneapolis to raise a family and pick up where he had left off on that hopeful day in 1941 at Fort Snelling. The Wright family in Minneapolis had its roots in Kentucky. His father, John Wright, also known as Drap, might never have come here if he could have found a job teaching in Kentucky. When he was 11, Drap wanted an education, and he wanted to join his father, Sam Wright, the sergeant in the 10th Cavalry. He traveled by train, wagon, horse, and b***o to join Sam Wright's company in Utah.
The only black youngster on the post, he got his early education there before returning to Kentucky and enrolling in a teachers' college. After graduating, he married Fannie Hall and soon set out in search of work. His education, as it worked out, wasn't over. Kentucky didn't pay salaries to black teachers, and the couple heard there were opportunities in the west, in Minneapolis. As it worked out, they didn't hire black teachers here, either.
So Drap Wright went downtown and got a job as a department store floorwalker. Soon after, Fannie joined him with their first child, a daughter. They had a tough time at first, said Boyd. Fannie couldn't stand the cold, and there was a depression, and Drap got laid off. In 1900 Drap Wright took a post office civil service examination.
With his college education, he passed it easily. He was the only clerk with a college education. But in all the 41 years he worked at the post office he was never promoted. He did, however, save money. "If he handed out a nickel, he wanted a nickel back," Boyd said.
By saving, the family bought a house in the 2400 block of 11th Av. S., then rented that one out and had another one built on E. 22nd St. Then they saved enough to buy a 20-acre farm in Crystal and its 1867 farmhouse. When Boyd Wright was mustered into the Army in March 1941 at Fort Snelling, he wanted to think he was leaving behind the painful problems of race. But almost immediately, racial ironies began leaping out at him.
He and his brother Frank stood in a tight little knot of four or five black men while the young white recruits marched in another direction. The black men waited. Boyd Wright learned later what was going on. The whites were headed for the Army Air Corps. The blacks would take the next train for Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where they would join the all-black - except of course for the officers - U.S.
10th Cavalry. Many years earlier, Wright's grandfather, Sam Wright, had been a sergeant in 10th Cavalry, in a day when the black horsemen specialized in collecting Indian intelligence. For Boyd Wright, now a retired postal worker who lives with his wife, Mae, in the farmhouse his father bought in 1916, this was a link in a long chain of ironies that brought his family to the Twin Cities from Kentucky at the turn of the century. New ones were forged for each generation of Wrights as they carefully stepped through the area's social and educational systems. Wright's life during World War II is an example.
He had graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1937 with a major in mortuary science. When he arrived at Fort Leavenworth, an officer told him he knew of a grave registration company at Camp Lee, Va. So Wright boarded a train bound for Virginia. When he got there, an officer told him, "We don't have no place for n***** in this company. So Wright handled rations and supplies in a segregated railhead company. Before he got back to the Twin Cities he served through the entire African campaign and then went on to join the invasions in Italy and the south of France.
A Wright family portrait taken about Charles, Mae and Boyd Jr. But that didn't stop the ironies. $10,000. Boyd's sister, Martha, now 66, was the only black girl in school. She got the highest grades.
She entered the University of Minnesota when she was 15, graduated with honors. But when she tried to get a job teaching in the Minneapolis school system, Boyd said, "They laughed in her face." She left town to find work. Just as blacks had come north earlier, she went south during the mid '30s to Savannah (Ga.) State College, where she got a job teaching math. She retired recently as dean of the college's computer school and acting president. Boyd Wright, now 68, graduated in mortuary science.
But he couldn't find work here, either. So he, too, went south, to Atlanta, seeking opportunities. He didn't find them in mortuary science, but he met his wife, Mae, who had grown up in Boston, went to school there, and had gone south to Savannah to find work as assistant to the president of the same school where Martha taught math. When Boyd got home from the Army, he took the postal civil service exam and, like his father, went to work in the post office. He worked there until he retired.
When Drap Wright died in 1953. Boyd Wright moved his family - by then he and Mae had three children 1977: From left were Boyd Sr., and one on the way - from a neighborhood of Indians, whites and Mexicans around Chicago and Franklin Avenues. to his father's farmhouse in pure white Crystal. When his first son, John Wright II, started second grade in the Robbinsdale district, he was the only black child in the school. He remembers his first day in school when he got into three fights over racial insults and was sent to the principal's office.
Also, he' said, "I don't remember ever studying anything about blacks, " so I had to educate myself." He is an associate professor of English in the African Studies program at the University of Minnesota. His sister, Beryl, a graduate in political science and international relations at Macalester College, is working on a doctorate in art history and school administration. A brother, Boyd Jr., is a graduate of the university's dental school and practices in St. Paul, and his youngest brother, Charles, a business school graduate, is a businessman. Mae Wright, who earned a master's degree in special education from the university, retired recently after 20 years of teaching.
A final irony: When Drap Wright died, Fannie Wright sold the 20 acres to around their house to developers. When the property was subdivided, a black family tried to buy a lot. The developer wouldn't sell to blacks.
