Theodore S. Wright

Theodore Sedgwick Wright (April 1797 – March 25, 1847), sometimes Theodore Sedgewick Wright, was an African American abolitionist and minister who was active in New York City, where he led the First Colored Presbyterian Church as its second pastor. He was the first African American to attend Princeton Theological Seminary (and the second to graduate from any US seminary), from which he graduated in 1828.

In 1833, Wright became a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, an influential interracial association of abolitionists, and served on its executive committee until 1840. He also was a founding member of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the Union Missionary Society, and the American Missionary Association.

Early life and education Theodore Sedgwick Wright was born in April 1797 to free parents in Providence, Rhode Island. He was named in honor of lawyer and politician Theodore Sedgwick. As a child, Wright moved with his family to Schenectady, New York. He attended the African Free School in New York City and flourished under the mentorship of Samuel Cornish. His father, Richard P. G. Wright, was a barber and an antislavery activist who served as a delegate at the 1817 Black convention in Philadelphia that opposed the mission of the American Colonization Society to persuade free Blacks to expatriate to Liberia.

With the aid of Governor DeWitt Clinton and Arthur Tappan of the New York Manumission Society, Wright became the first person of color admitted to the Princeton Theological Seminary. for race relations, in which the white faculty and students were united behind the American Colonization Society's efforts to remove free Blacks to Liberia. When John Brown Russwurm in Freedom's Journal spurned Wright's professor Archibald Alexander's support of colonization, Wright said the "united views and intentions of the people of color were made known, and the nation awoke as from slumber." A licentiate minister at the time, he was ordained in early 1829, succeeding the church's founder, Samuel Cornish. He served as pastor of this church until his death, when he was succeeded by his friend Henry Highland Garnet. At a national Colored Convention in 1837, he opposed a resolution advocating Black self-defense, which he deemed "un-Christian." He was a founding member and vice president of the Phoenix Society and was instrumental in establishing the Phoenix High School for Black students. He served on the executive committee of the New York Committee of Vigilance, established to try to help fugitive slaves evade slave catchers and resist their being returned to the South.

Legacy

The only book-length work on Wright is the 2005 Princeton Theological Seminary master's thesis by Daniel Paul Morrison. Entitled Theodore Sedgwick Wright (1794–1847): Early Princeton Theological Seminary Abolitionist, the thesis reconstructs the biography of the man and offers insight into Wright struggle with the faculty of Princeton Seminary and the American Colonization Society which all of the faculty supported. Morrison's work was cited in James H. Moorhead's 2012 book Princeton Theological Seminary in American Religion and Culture.

In October 2021, as part of a "multi-year action plan to repent for [its] historical ties to slavery," Princeton Theological Seminary renamed its library the Theodore Sedgwick Wright Library.