Why Jonathan Jasper Wright?

How did I get interested in the life of Jonathan Jasper Wright? February 2022 was Black History Month, as it is every February in the US. I realized that my knowledge of Black history was woefully thin, even though I’ve read a great deal of history over the last 3 decades or so. And what little I did know was Black history via the white leaders and society that impacted it, not the Black citizens themselves. (Many books about the Civil War, Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson do not equal a knowledge of Black history.)

In March 2022, I mentioned this at a dinner with my wife and in-laws. I was working my way through W.E.B DuBois’ “Black Reconstruction in America.” My father-in-law, who was born and lived most of his life in Wilkes-Barre, said, “Do you realize that the first Black lawyer in Pennsylvania was from Luzerne County? And he also served on the state Supreme Court in South Carolina, and lived in Beaufort County.” Which of course is where we having dinner at that very moment.

So that did it… a need to learn more on Black American History, and a subject who had many firsts, and who also lived his life in several places we knew well. And nagging questions: why was someone so accomplished so overlooked in the history books? And why was an era that was so consequential so little explored? Perhaps Reconstruction was a lot more than pejorative accounts of “carpet-baggers” and “scalawags.”

And how much fun it has been to explore areas where I have spent a lot of time the past 20 years, right in the neighborhood, where this history happened.

[Jonathan Jasper Wright Historical Marker in Springville, PA]

[Note: the more I looked, the more I found on this subject. Not only old history books or journal articles, written during the Jim Crow era, but recent papers and books, re-evaluations of the time. And, most amazingly, personal letters from some of the main characters in this story. We’ll dive into sources a little more next time.]