He was influential for his medical research as well as his efforts pushing for racial equality in medicine and involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which he served as chairman for nearly two decades.

[4][5] Ceah died shortly after Louis's birth and his mother, a sewing teacher named Lula Tompkins, remarried in 1899.

Also a physician, Louis's step-father, William Fletcher Penn, was the first African-American to graduate from Yale School of Medicine.

Despite being a very educated individual, Wright was deemed unfit by Channing Frothingham, MD––one of the medical school's interviewers––due to his attendance of an undergraduate institution that permitted blacks.

However, after subjecting Wright to numerous tests, Frothingham ultimately ruled that he had "adequate chemistry for admission to this school.

[9] Throughout his life Wright involved himself in civil rights efforts, beginning in college when he missed three weeks of school to join picket lines protesting D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a film controversial for its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan.

[1] He joined the NAACP after medical school and remained involved with the organization for the rest of his life, eventually serving as chairman of its national board of directors from 1933 until his death in 1952.

He actively opposed segregated hospitals, including a successful effort in 1930 to stop the construction of a new such facility proposed by the Rosenwald Fund.

Edwards, like Wright, graduated at the top of his class at Harvard Medical School and serves as the first African-American surgeon at the fictionalized Knickerbocker Hospital in Manhattan.