Jonathan Jasper Wright (1840-1885)
Springville Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Jurist, educator, politician. The son of runaway slaves, Wright became the first black lawyer in Pennsylvania. He supported Frederick Douglass in advocating suffrage and legal equality for blacks. During Reconstruction in 1870, he was appointed South Carolina State Supreme Court justice, the first African American United States Appellate Judge. Wright's boyhood home was here in Springville.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Born in 1840 to parents who had escaped slavery, Jonathan Jasper Wright grew up in Springville and went on to become the first Black lawyer admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania. He stood with Frederick Douglass in the fight for the vote and legal equality, and in 1870, during Reconstruction, he was elevated to the South Carolina Supreme Court—the first African American to sit on a state's highest court. His rise from a runaway slaves' son to the bench marked a breathtaking, if fragile, moment of possibility.
Why it matters
Wright's career embodies the brief promise of Reconstruction, when Black Americans first entered the highest ranks of the nation's legal and political life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The years just after the Civil War were among the most hopeful and most fragile in American history. Slavery had been abolished, and for a brief window known as Reconstruction, the country experimented with something it had never truly attempted: full citizenship and political participation for Black Americans.
For a man born in 1840 to parents who had escaped slavery, the arc of these years was almost impossibly steep. To be the child of runaways was to begin life with the law itself arrayed against your very freedom. To rise, within a few decades, into the learned professions and then high public office was to leap across a chasm that had swallowed generations.
Rural Springville, in the hills of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, was the unlikely starting point. Far from the centers of power, it was the boyhood home of a man whose life would carry him into the very heart of the nation's struggle over equality.
People & events
Jonathan Jasper Wright was a jurist, an educator, and a politician—a rare combination for any man of his time, and a near-miracle for the son of people who had fled bondage. He became the first Black lawyer admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania, breaking a barrier in the legal profession itself.
He did not keep that achievement to himself. Wright stood alongside Frederick Douglass, the towering voice of the age, in advocating for suffrage and legal equality for Black Americans—lending his training and his standing to the broader fight for the vote and for equal protection under the law.
Then, in 1870, during the Reconstruction years, came the height of his career: appointment as a justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. In that role he became the first African American to serve as a United States appellate judge—a Black man sitting on the highest court of a Southern state only years after the end of slavery.
Its place in the American story
Wright's career is Reconstruction's promise made flesh. For a brief season, Black Americans entered the highest ranks of the nation's legal and political life—legislatures, conventions, and, in his case, the bench of a state supreme court. His appointment proved that the barriers were artificial, not natural; that the only thing that had kept such men from such seats was the law's refusal to let them in.
His alliance with Frederick Douglass ties his individual story to the great national cause of the era: the fight to turn emancipation into genuine equality, to secure the ballot and the equal protection of the laws.
Yet the word "fragile" hangs over it all. The doors that opened in the 1870s were, across much of the country, forced shut again in the decades that followed. Wright's life marks both how far the nation reached during Reconstruction and how much of that reach was, tragically, not yet allowed to last.
If you visit
This is a quiet, rural place, and that quiet is part of the point. Springville does not announce itself the way a battlefield or a capital does, and yet it produced a man who sat on a state supreme court. Let the contrast work on you.
The marker stands near where Wright's boyhood home once was. As you look over the surrounding countryside, try to picture the distance he traveled—not just the miles to South Carolina, but the far greater distance from the child of runaway slaves to a judge's robes.
It makes a meaningful stop on any journey through Pennsylvania's history of freedom and the struggle for civil rights. Pair it in your mind with the era's better-known names, and remember that some of the most extraordinary lives of that age began in the most ordinary-looking of places.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Jonathan Jasper Wright
- · Frederick Douglass
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
William Camp Gildersleeve (1795-1871)
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2004
A prosperous Wilkes-Barre merchant, William Camp Gildersleeve turned his home and business into a refuge for freedom seekers, making him a central figure in the Underground Railroad of the Wyoming Valley. In 1853 he testified in a widely reported federal case arising from the shooting of a fugitive named William Thomas by deputy marshals—testimony that drew national notice, especially in African American newspapers. His public stand came amid the fierce national conflict over the Fugitive Slave Act.
John S. Fine (1893-1978)
Nanticoke, PA · est. 2016
John S. Fine rose from the coal country around Nanticoke through the courts to the governorship of Pennsylvania in the early 1950s. His administration modernized the state in ways large and small, from the first televised inauguration to its first permanent sales tax. Notably, he ended segregation in the Pennsylvania National Guard and opened the State Police to African American troopers, early steps toward integration in the postwar North.
The Dennis Farm
Brooklyn Township, PA · est. 2015
In 1793, Prince Perkins, a free African American veteran of the Revolutionary War, came from Connecticut to settle this land in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, and his descendants have held it for more than two centuries. His granddaughter Angeline Perkins Dennis and her husband Henry expanded the farm, sustaining a rare, lasting Black landholding in an integrated rural community. The property offers a window into free African American settlement and the strong antislavery currents that ran through this corner of Pennsylvania.
Susquehanna County
Montrose, PA · est. 1982
Split from Luzerne County in 1810 and named for its great river, Susquehanna County became an early hotbed of antislavery activity, with Montrose serving as an Underground Railroad stop. It was also home to Galusha A. Grow, the congressman who championed the 1862 Homestead Act. That law opened millions of acres of western land to ordinary settlers.