SHARECROPPERS, POINT GUARDS AND PROFESSORS

BY STEVE BARLOW

REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

WATERBURY

As a young boy, Dr. James “Manny” Wright knew his grandmother was remarkable, but he didn’t realize just how much until hearing her eulogy in North Carolina in 2015.

Dazell Wright, who died at 89, grew up a sharecropper on tobacco farms down South until she and much of her family came north to Waterbury in the 1960s as part of the Great Migration.

“I never knew the stories about her being a sharecropper,” said Wright, an All-Stater for Wilby High’s 1992 Naugatuck Valley League boys basketball champions.

“My uncle gives the eulogy and tells all of these stories about my grandmother and the first 40 years of her life, which none of us cousins who grew up in Connecticut knew,” Wright explained. “This woman was incredible. She was a small, petite woman, and she never complained.”

His uncle’s speech in 2015 and the curiosity it sparked became the impetus for Wright, 50, now a college professor at San Diego State, to author “Heirs of the Great Migration: How the Past Became the Future.” It is the story of his grandmother, his mother, Lynda Wright Williams, and their family that arrived in Waterbury in the 1960s in search of steady work in the booming brass mills.

It is also an account of Wright’s own remarkable life. He grew up in a Brass City where drugs had replaced the hope that the factories, now shuttered, once offered to previous generations.

Yet he surmounted that, along with two years of incarceration in Georgia on a felony charge that shouldn’t have been, to earn his doctorate in educational administration from Michigan State.

Overcoming obstacles, though, runs in his bloodlines.

His grandmother’s family had once owned acres of land in North Carolina, Wright said, but it was systematically swindled from them by unscrupulous lenders in the Jim Crow era.

“Predatory loans,” he said. “During the offseason, (farmers) take out loans when there are no crops. It was more than they could pay back. Eventually, the land was taken from them, and my grandmother wound up back on the farms working as a sharecropper. That was the case for a lot of African Americans.”

Sharecroppers were tenant farmers who typically had to pay so much in rent that they became mired in poverty. It was an exhausting circle seemingly impossible to escape.

“My mom remembers carrying tobacco from the fields to the barns,” Wright said. “She didn’t go to school be- See WRIGHT, Page 14A

Dr. James “Manny” Wright, a member of the 1992 Wilby High basketball team, is now a professor at San Diego State. He recently published a book, “Heirs of the Great Migration: How the Past Became the Future,” about the history of his family in Waterbury and North Carolina.

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

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cause she had to work.”

That started to change in 1959, when an uncle and an aunt moved to Waterbury and found work in the Scovill Brass mill. Another aunt followed. They were part of the Great Migration that saw six million African Americans move from the South to take the plentiful industrial jobs in the North.

“They brought that work ethic with them to Waterbury,” Wright said. “It translated well into the factories, working long shifts and long days.”

In 1963, two of his uncles drove to North Carolina and brought Wright’s grandmother, his mother, then 9, and six aunts back to Waterbury. All 10 of them made the trip in a Buick Roadmaster.

“I asked my uncle, ‘How did 10 people fit in one car?’” Wright noted. “He said that back then the front seat was like a couch, same in the back, and they didn’t have a lot of possessions.”

They were able to build a better life in Connecticut. Several relatives eventually started their own businesses and his mother, who died in 2019 at 65, spent 30 years as an accountant for the state before retiring.

The city’s brass industry, though, was in decline from the competition of other materials, such as plastics, and foreign manufacturers. By the time Wright and his cousins, many of whom still live in the area, reached high school, they lived in a different city.

“All of those factory jobs were gone,” Wright said. “We inherited divested communities, failed public schools, an avalanche of drugs in the poorest neighborhoods. This is a phenomenon that happened all over the country.”

Wright was the point guard for the 1992 Wilby team coached by the iconic Reggie O’Brien that featured three other 1,000point scorers: Marcus Robinson, DeVonne Parker and Terence Lott.

At 5-foot-10, he decided to not pursue basketball in college. Wright attended Virginia State for two years before moving to Atlanta, where he took classes at a community college while hoping to enroll at Morehouse.

A year after he arrived in Georgia, though, he was in an auto accident that turned into a fistfight. This occurred in the wake of the 1994 Crime Bill, and his initial misdemeanor charge was elevated to felony aggravated assault.

“It was pretty mind-boggling that the charge was upgraded,” Wright said.

After two years in jail, he was released to a halfway house. His job was to help maintain a fleet of state vehicles.

“I happened to run across a couple of state parole board members. I got to know them and talked to them about my charges,” Wright said. “They couldn’t believe it and asked for my record numbers. After a couple of days, I was let go.”

A friend later helped him get a job teaching English in Egypt, which is where he met his wife and had two sons.

Wright returned to Connecticut in 2008 to help his mother and enrolled at Post University, where he completed his bachelor’s degree, and then Southern Connecticut, where he received his master’s degree.

In 2013, he began studying for his doctorate at Michigan State.

By then, his grandmother had moved back home to North Carolina and his mother followed soon after.

After they died, he learned more stories about his relatives and began researching family history. It became part of his doctoral dissertation, which sparked the idea of writing a book.

“Heirs of the Great Migration” was officially launched Feb. 22, 2023, Wright’s mother’s birthday and the same month his grandmother would’ve turned 100.

“Heirs of the Great Migration: How the Past Became the Present” is available on Amazon.com. Wright plans to do a book signing in Waterbury sometime in June.

‘Heirs of the Great Migration: How the Past Became the Future” is available on Amazon. com.