During his political career he fought to maintain racial segregation, fighting with President Harry S. Truman over civil rights legislation, and holding other racist views.

After a brief absence from politics, Wright was elected as Mississippi's lieutenant governor and served until he ascended to the governorship following the death of Thomas L. Bailey on November 2, 1946.

[23] Waits resigned shortly after being appointed as chairman of the House Rules Committee and Joe Owen was selected by Wright to replace him.

[26] Wright appointed a five-man committee of Walter Sillers, John T. Armstrong, Gerald Chatham, Guy B. Mitchell, and Sam Lumpkin to draft the articles of impeachment.

[32] After the United States entered World War II Wright attempted to rejoin the army, but was rejected due to his poor eyesight.

[35] Walter D. Davis, a former member of the state House of Representatives and attorney in the Department of War, was appointed to serve as his campaign manager.

[44] In June 1946, he refused to authorize the extradition of George Johnson, a black man facing charges of child abandonment, back to California and refused to commute the death sentence of James Leo Williams, a 25 year old black man convicted for murder, while serving as acting governor.

[47] On October 30, 1946, Governor Bailey suffered a stroke and was in poor health for the next four days until he died from a spinal tumor on November 2.

Wright was supposed to leave the state for a physical checkup, but remained in Mississippi due to Bailey's poor health and succeeded him following his death to fulfill the remainder of his term as the 49th governor.

[50][51] The issue was resolved when it was proposed that Bilbo's credentials remain on the table while he returned home to Mississippi to seek medical treatment for oral cancer.

On October 1, Wright threatened to place members of the Mississippi National Guard onboard every bus with orders to shoot to protect the buses.

[56] In November, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation was formed as a temporarily state police force to prevent further violence during the strike, although it was criticized as similar to the Gestapo and the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Hattiesburg passed a resolution calling it fascist, Wright successfully transformed it into a permanent police force.

[63] In the general election he defeated former Nebraskan Governor George L. Sheldon, who ran on the ballot as an Independent Republican and who had stated that he had only expected to receive a few thousand votes against Wright.

[69] However, Senators Allen J. Ellender and Claude Pepper, Representative William Madison Whittington, Governor Benjamin Travis Laney, and Alabama Democratic Chairman Gessner T. McCorvey criticized him stating that they should remain in the party to reform it from the inside.

[69][70][71] On January 21, the state house and senate approved resolutions supporting threats to leave the party if more "anti-southern" legislation was passed.

[72] In April, the state legislature passed the first workers' compensation bill in Mississippi history and it was later signed into law by Wright.

[79] On September 7, Wright declared a state of emergency as Mississippi had suffered its second highest number of polio cases in its history during 1949.

[80] In February 1948, a "State-wide Mass Meeting of Negro citizens" organized in Jackson, Mississippi, and called for a biracial committee to oversee the educational improvement project that was started in 1946, but Wright declined their request.

[81] Due to federal threats to force the integration of schools Wright reorganized Mississippi's public education system in an attempt to maintain racial segregation.

[82] In 1951, he opposed attempts by the NAACP to admit black students into white-only colleges and stated that he would "insist on (racial) segregation regardless of the costs or consequences".

"[84] Wright's inaugural address calling for Southerners to abandon the Democratic Party was supported by Senator James Eastland, who was later invited to speak before the state legislature.

While there almost four hundred Arkansas political leaders voted unanimously in favor of a resolution supporting Wright and in Virginia Governor William M. Tuck called for the state legislature to prevent Truman from appearing on the ballot.

[98] Wright and former Governor Hugh L. White led the twenty-two member Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention.

[99] An attempt was made by Charles Hamilton to prevent the seating of the Mississippi delegation due to its pledge to leave the party if Truman was nominated or if the platform was pro-civil rights.

[100] On July 14, he led the Mississippi delegation in a walkout of the convention to protest the adoption of a pro-civil rights plank into the party's platform.

Although the party won multiple states it was unsuccessful in its goal of preventing Truman from winning the election as he still managed to defeat Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey without the unanimous support of the Solid South.

[104] Wright continued to defend states' rights and segregation, but conceded that complete obstinance along the lines of the 1948 departure from the Democratic Party would cause Mississippi to lose "its standing with everybody in America.

[111] Hoping to build off of white discontent with the United States Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling mandating desegregation in public schools, Wright framed himself as an ardent segregationist.

[1] Most state newspaper obituaries focused on his participation in the 1948 Dixiecrat movement and his staunch segregationist pledges in the 1955 gubernatorial race.

"[119] Historian James Patterson Smith wrote that Wright's association with the Dixiecrat movement "built the profoundly negative image that has long obscured his substantial achievements as a progressive legislator".