Richard Robert Wright Jr. (April 16, 1878 in Cuthbert, Georgia – December 12, 1967) was an American sociologist, social worker, and minister.

In 1911, Wright became the first African American to earn a doctorate in sociology from an organized graduate school when he received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Wright began attending the Divinity School at the University of Chicago in 1898, where he found mentors in William Rainey Harper and Shailer Mathews.

[5] Wright studied in Berlin for a term then went to the University of Leipzig, where he wrote his thesis The Historicity of the Acts of the Apostles.

In 1911, Wright became the first African-American to earn a doctorate in sociology from an organized graduate school when he received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Wright was preceded by at least one other African-American at Penn: Pezavia O'Connell, who earned a PhD in 1898, in Semitic Studies, for a dissertation on notions of the clean and unclean in the Hebrew Bible.

During his time in the doctoral program at Penn, Wright overlapped with the suffragist Alice Paul, and they shared the same advisor in Carl Kelsey.

After Wright graduated from Georgia State College in 1898, he enrolled in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

Soon after he received his Bachelor of Divinity Degree (1901) and Masters in Biblical Languages (1904), he gained an interest in the new field of sociology.

As editor, Wright focused on social welfare, becoming a leading advocate on migrant rights during the Great Migration of African Americans to the North from the rural South.

[7] Wright advocated for African-American owned banks that served not only as financial institutions, but as symbols of independence and self-reliance for blacks.

In regard to his decision to join the ministry, Wright said “I was much inclined toward law; to devoting my life to getting my people’s legal rights, which were being increasingly denied.