THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 19, 1996 TAG: 9604190549
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B7 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR., NEW YORK TIMES
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Dr. Stephen J. Wright, a former president of Fisk University who spent his life broadening educational opportunities for black America, died Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. He was 85 and a resident of Hampton, Va., where he had graduated from Hampton Institute and served as an educator there.
In a career that could stand as a road map of black educational progress in the 20th century, Wright did more than show the way. He also blazed the trail for generations of black students who no longer regard a college education as a rarity but as an integral part of their lives.
The son of a physician in the small town of Dillon, S.C., he studied at historically black colleges, taught at historically black colleges and served as president of historically black colleges, Bluefield State in West Virginia and Fisk, the Nashville university long regarded as the premier black institution of higher learning.
Then, after his retirement from Fisk in 1966, he became president of the United Negro College Fund, the umbrella group formed to raise money for some 30 traditionally black colleges, and a consultant and executive of the College Board.
Along the way, Wright, who specialized in teaching teachers, was in the forefront of efforts to improve the quality of black education and to remove the roadblocks that had barred black students from going to college. [Text missing]
Asht graduated with a degree in chemistry from Hampton Institute in Virginia - now Hampton University - and earned a master's degree in education at Howard University. He broke away from the black educational track in 1943 to do graduate work at Columbia and at City College in New York and to receive his doctorate from New York University.
By then, Wright, an accomplished musician who had begun his professional life as a high school music teacher in Centreville, Md., and later served as a high school principal in Upper Marlboro, Md., had become an assistant professor of education at North Carolina College in Durham. He secured that post because, he always said, because the college (now North Carolina Central) wanted him to start a band.
After serving as professor of education and dean of students at Hampton, he was president of Bluefield State for four years before becoming Fisk's seventh president, and second black president in 1957.
Wright, who wrote widely on education, had such a voracious appetite for knowledge that he read 1,000 pages a day until six months ago. He was in such demand for his counsel and leadership that he served as a member or officer of more than two dozen national boards, commissions and associations and was so appreciated for his service that he rarely had June to himself: He received more than a dozen honorary degrees.
Wright is survived by his wife, Rosalind.
KEYWORDS: DEATH OBITUARY by CNB