Judith Wright

b. 1939

Judith Wright was born in 1939 in Newton, Massachusetts. She was raised by her mother, primarily a homemaker, and her father a jeweler. Judith attended the local public school system until graduation when she went on to study at Smith College. After serving in and organizing during the Civil Rights Movement, Wright returned to her education and earned a graduate degree in speech therapy from Boston University. She spent her life fighting for justice and has been involved in numerous civil rights groups and other activist circles. She married her husband in 1964, after her first trip to the South with the Freedom Riders, and they raised two children together. She also authors Acts of Resistance: A Freedom Rider Looks Back on the Civil Rights Movement.

Scope and Content Note

Wright describes the closeness of her family growing up and the relationships she had with her grandparents, who were immigrants from Eastern Europe. Wright talks about her relationship with Judaism as a child and her practices later in life, explaining that the Jewish holidays were most valuable to her because they brought her family together.  Wright reflects on her family's political activism, including her grandmother, a leftist activist investigated by McCarthy, and her mother's liberal politics during the Spanish Civil War. Wright was drawn to the Civil Rights Movement in 1961, during her senior year of college, when she describes learning about the sit-ins taking place in the South. After graduation, she began her political career when she joined the Freedom Rides with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Wright recalls her trip across the South in a mixed-race group to desegregate public facilities in bus stations, ending with their arrest and incarceration in Jackson, Mississippi. Wright and the group spent six weeks in a maximum-security prison. She remembers organizing a radio hour and other recreation from within the cell block and recalls the brutality of prison and how poorly she and the other women were treated. After her arrest and incarceration, Wright describes returning to Boston to earn her graduate degree in speech therapy. During this time, she helped to organize the Boston contingent of the March on Washington. Soon after, Wright married and moved to Meridian, Mississippi. She reflects on the year they spent in the South, where they worked to register Black voters and hold sit-ins, teach at a Freedom School, and help to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. During this time, the Black Power movement was gaining traction, and Wright talks about working with the Freedom Party in New Orleans during the meeting of the Mississippi Democratic Party. After spending time in the South, Wright discusses taking up issues like draft counseling, the women's movement, antiwar activities, and fighting AIDS. She withdrew from some of the higher-risk activities of civil rights activism after the birth of her two children, though she continued her involvement with various activist groups. Wright reflects on being a married woman with children when the women's movement hit and its impact on women in her position. In 2000, Wright was honored at the Women Who Dared event in Boston.

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How to cite this page

Oral History of Judith Wright. Interviewed by Judith Rosenbaum. 25 July 2000. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on May 8, 2024) <http://jwa.org/oralhistories/wright-judith>.

Oral History of Judith Wright by the Jewish Women's Archive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://jwa.org/contact/OralHistory.