Robert Herring Wright

Image source: Robert H Wright

Robert Herring Wright (1870-1934) served as the chief administrative officer for the first twenty-five years of East Carolina’s history, longer than any subsequent president or chancellor. Wright’s leadership secured for the new school exceptional academic integrity and professionalism that served it well for decades to come. Wright’s tenure at ECTTS ended in 1934, when he collapsed at his desk and died shortly thereafter, at the age of 64.

Hired in 1909 as East Carolina Teachers Training School’s founding president, Wright embodied the school’s dedication to uplifting the state through professional training for its future teachers. In 1921, Wright oversaw the evolution of the school’s curricular mission to complement North Carolina’s new emphasis on higher standards in teacher certification. A year later the school was renamed East Carolina Teachers College, reflecting its new standing as a four-year institution granting baccalaureate degrees for professionally certified teachers. By 1934, Wright’s final year as president, the school had realized remarkable growth: the student body and the faculty had increased ten-fold, and the physical campus more than doubled.

Throughout his tenure, Wright helped advance the educational revolution underway in North Carolina during the first half of the twentieth century. In one public address, he declared, “Human progress rests upon education.” Like many progressive leaders of the era, including Jarvis, Aycock, and Joyner, Wright studied at the University of North Carolina. Wright’s horizons were broadened further by graduate work at two northeastern schools, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City. Prior to becoming president of ECTTS, Wright taught at Baltimore City College and served as principal of Eastern High School, a girl’s school in Baltimore.

As with many progressives of his era, Wright believed that equal opportunity to universal education would solve all problems facing humanity. At the same time, he accepted the racially segregated public school system legitimized by the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision sanctioning “separate but equal” public facilities. Although Wright’s “chapel talks” to students on campus rarely evinced the racially-defined Jim Crow rhetoric of the early 20th century, neither did they challenge the white supremacist order of the era. The newly founded school he led, East Carolina, thus remained one of many expressions of the Jim Crow system of higher education in North Carolina in the early twentieth century, even as it brought increased professionalism to teacher education in the east.

Sources

• Bratton, Mary Jo. East Carolina University: The Formative Years, 1907-1982. Greenville, N. C.: Alumni Association, 1986.
• Jenkins, Mamie E. Robert Herring Wright: Educator, Executive, and Leader in Teacher Training, President of East Carolina Teachers” College, 1909-1934. Greenville, NC: East Carolina Teachers” College, 1938.
• “President Wright Gives Students Acct. Education Meeting,” Greenville Daily News. May 12, 1920.
• Records of Robert Herring Wright”s Tenure as President of East Carolina Teachers” College, 1909-1934. University Archives, #UA02-01. East Carolina University. J. Y. Joyner Library.
• Rives, Ralph Hardee. “Robert Herring Wright,” in William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, Vol. 6, T-Z, pp. 279-280.

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