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For fifty eight years Mary Wright has lived a life of service, having taught in the Spartanburg County Negro schools. She began teaching in a brush arbor near Inman, South Carolina, and now is accredited with being the founder of the city's leading Negro school, the Carrier Street School, and is also a leader in religious and charity work among Negroes.
Mary Wright never has stopped looking for ways to serve. A few years ago she became interested in playground work, and since then has made it a hobby that undoubtably has done great work for Negro children. She believed in being prepared. When she decided to engage in playground leadership, she went to Washington, attended the District of Columbia school for playground supervisors and observed the work on the playgrounds of the city.
Mary Wright was born a slave just before the close of the Civil War. Her parents belonged to the Wilson family on South Church Street. Her father was not educated, but he had great respect for education. When an opportunity presented itself to send his little girl to school, he did it, and later managed to send her for a year to Claflin College at Orangeburg, South Carolina.
Mary Wright's first schooling was received in a house converted into a school on the site of the Herald-Journal building. It was conducted by a Mr. and Mrs. Pool (white) who came down from the North right after the war with a zeal to educate the Negroes. "They were
Yankees, but they were not carpetbaggers," Mary Wright said. "Their aim was to give the South something rather than take away." She so admired the learning of Mr. and Mrs. Pool and their desire to divide it, she was imbued with the desire to serve right off and began at the age of nine, teaching a Sunday school class in the Methodist church.
The year after she attended Claflin College in 1878, she was engaged to teach in the brush arbor near Inman. A short time later, a log school house was erected for her. Later she taught in the town of Inman.
While she attended college only one year, Mary Wright has been a student all her life. She has kept up with the trends in teaching by home study, and was awarded a first class life certificate in 1921.
Mary Wright began teaching in Spartanburg in a residence known as the old Chaplin home. A few years later she founded the Carrier Street School, "A monument to my joy" as she expressed it.
Her work has not been confined to the school room. She has been chairman of the Negro division of the County Red Cross chapter since the World War. She founded a home on Cudd street for aged Negro women, which also is used for a day nursery and Bible school. She is chairman of the Christmas tree committee for needy children and has been on the county fair committee since 1931.
Mary Wright hasn't been content with educating thousands of other people's children, but has educated her own. She sent four daughters and three sons through the public schools of Spartanburg and some of them to college. All of her daughters became teachers, one son is an undertaker in Boston, Mass. Another a shoemaker in Washington and a third was a bicycle mechanic in Spartanburg for fifteen years, prior to his death in Washington where he had engaged in the same work.
With the Carrier Street School as a "monument to her joy," Mary Wright's reward for being a good and faithful public servant and doing things well includes the willing respect of thousands of Spartanburg citizens.
