Milton Wright (academic)

Milton S. J. Wright (1903 – 1972) was an African-American academic born in Georgia. He received his B.A. from Wilberforce University in 1926,[1] his M.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in Economics from Germany’s University of Heidelberg in 1932,[2] with the dissertation Die Wirtschafts Entwicklung und die Eingeborenenpolitik in den afrikanischen Schutzgebieten, 1884-1918 (Economic Development and Indigenous policy in the African Protectorates, 1884–1918). He was granted an audience by Adolf Hitler in Heidelberg in 1932. Hitler pointed out that blacks have no voting rights, and criticized them for being docile about their oppression, saying "Negroes must be definitely third-class people to allow white[s] to lynch them, beat them, segregate them, without rising up against them!" The Pittsburgh Courier ran a front page article on the conversation shortly after the U.S. entered the Second World War. Wright noted that throughout the conversation, Hitler, though calm, asked questions and immediately gave his own answers. For example, he asked "Don't you think your people are destined perpetually to be slaves of one kind or another?" and replied "Yes! Your people are a hopeless lot. I don't hate them... I pity the poor devils."[3] The conversation was dramatically reenacted in 1944 on the anti-racist radio show New World A-Coming.[4] Wright became a professor and head of the department of Economics and Political Science at Wilberforce in 1933[1] and in 1959 he was Dean of the College.[5]

Publications
  • Milton Wright (1928). The Historical Development of Negro Journals. New York: Columbia University (Masters essay).
  • Milton Wright (1932). Die Wirtschafts Entwicklung und die Eingeborenenpolitik in den afrikanischen Schutzgebieten, 1884-1918. Heidelberg: Badische Ruprecht-Karls-Universität.
  • Wright, Milton S. J. (June 1950). "I Spent Four Hours with Adolph Hitler: First and Only Negro to Meet Nazi Dictator Tells of Terrifying Session After Storm Troopers Accuse Him of Plotting Hitler Assassination". Ebony. 5 (8).

Notes
  1. Films, Encyclopædia Britannica; Inc (c. 1954). Wilberforce University Bulletin, volume XXXIX & XL. p. 15.
  2. "A database of African Americans who have earned doctoral degrees, 1876-1943" (xls). W.J.Murchison Community Center. Retrieved 2008-10-13.
  3. Juliete Parker (2003). A Man Named Doris. Xulon Press. p. 56. ISBN 1-59160-912-7.
  4. New World A-Coming, WMCA, New York, 12 March 1944. 3-4.
  5. "Wilberforce Choir Will Sing Here". Mansfield News Journal. May 3, 1959. Retrieved 2008-10-12.
gollark: That's probably for the best.
gollark: It is most "based" to choose political opinions via random number generator.
gollark: JPEG bad AVIF/HEIF/JPEG-XL good, as they say.
gollark: ```-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Language files blank comment code-------------------------------------------------------------------------------JSON 165 11 0 565756C++ 254 16515 19391 94958C 326 13371 23113 76903C/C++ Header 184 9926 27317 60072Perl 60 7030 6406 55395Assembly 51 5083 1805 54836Go 88 5680 6006 51081make 11 4195 1731 8058Python 38 1596 3147 5219Markdown 22 1564 0 4993CMake 73 521 514 4010Bazel 1 59 41 471Bourne Shell 6 64 96 252YAML 1 0 3 66CSS 1 13 0 57-------------------------------------------------------------------------------SUM: 1281 65628 89570 982127-------------------------------------------------------------------------------```
gollark: I have a copy of BoringSSL somewhere for very arbitrary reasons so I am `cloc`ing it now.
  • Robert Fikes Jr. (Winter 2000–2001). "African Americans Who Teach German Language and Culture". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (30): 108–113. JSTOR 2679113.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.