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rispus Attucks Wright, an African American whose life in the practice of law in Los Angeles is a triumph of personal accomplishment and civic engagement, embodies Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous observation about shucking the weight of American racial attitudes. Despite the oppressive burdens imposed on persons because of religion, country and race, a few sturdy individuals – de Tocqueville was writing about freed blacks in 1831 – might nonetheless “surmount the prejudices.”
Cris Wright’s life has been touched by an impressive span of history, ranging from slavery to Martin Luther King to the current political and social agenda in the United States. His father, Warner Wright, was born a slave in Louisiana in 1864; 25 years later he graduated from Leland University, a black Louisiana college founded by northern Baptists. Warner Wright’s career as a teacher and school principal in segregated Louisiana schools imparted an educational imperative into his family’s life, along with a keen sense of African-American lives. Two of his children, Booker T. Wright and Crispus Attucks Wright, were named for prominent black figures – Booker T. Washing-ton, the foremost black leader in post-Civil War America, and Crispus Attucks, a freed black seaman who was the first man to be killed in the Revolutionary War.
Cris Wright was born in 1914, the youngest of eight children. Soon after moving to Los Angeles in 1919, Warner Wright died; his wife, who worked as a janitor at Westlake Park and as a domestic to support her family, never compromised her husband’s belief in the importance of education. Among the seven of her eight children who attended college, three of them studied at USC – Warner II, who became a physician, Mercedes and Cris.
Cris Wright’s civil consciousness was sparked in 1928. While selling newspapers in front of the Hotel Somerville – owned by John and Vada Somerville, both USC dental school graduates – young Wright met W.E.B. DuBois, who was attending the NAACP national conference in Los Angeles. Three decades later, Wright would host the Reverend Martin Luther King on his visits to the city. In between DuBois and King, Cris Wright, while an undergraduate student at UCLA and at USC in the mid-1930s, participated in the boycott of Central Avenue businesses which refused to hire black employees. “Don’t spend where you can’t work” was the motto of those days; for Wright, it became a fitting anthem melding economics and civil rights and an orientation which would last a lifetime.
From the 1920s through the 1950s, Central Avenue was the locus of black commercial and professional life in Los Angeles. The few black attorneys – perhaps no more than two dozen, estimates Wright – practicing in Los Angeles before World War II maintained offices in the vicinity of Central and Vernon; here, young Wright, whose verbal skills won him notice as an accomplished debater at Manual Arts High School, met Bert McDonald LL.B ’23, one of the most prominent black attorneys in Los Angeles. McDonald’s words in praise of his life in the law and the USC Law School greatly impressed the young student. After school, he often visited the red sandstone courthouse in Los Angeles, admiring the skills of the city’s foremost black litigator, Willis O. Tyler, and his youthful partner Edwin L. Jefferson, a 1931 graduate of USC Law School.
Wright entered USC in 1932, but owing to the Depres-sion, transferred to UCLA for two years; he returned to USC in 1935, earning a B.A. in 1936 and a law degree in 1938.
Entering practice in 1940, Wright confronted the common difficulty facing all neophyte attorneys: persuading clients to entrust their cases to them. Unlike Caucasian lawyers, though, the young black attorney faced a secondary problem: persuading black clients that representation by black attorneys was comparable to that offered by white lawyers. Additionally, the Los Angeles County Bar Association was restricted.
Undaunted, Wright joined a group of other Los Angeles black attorneys to form the John M. Langston Bar Association in 1943. Intended as a professional forum for the local black legal community, the Langston Bar Association also dealt with issues of prejudice. In addition to Cris Wright, the founding membership included USC law graduates Edwin Jefferson and David Williams ’37. Vince Townsend, one of the primary movers of the association, did post-graduate study at USC Law School; Ivan J. Johnson ’27 was among the founders. The Griffith Brothers, Thomas and Lloyd, both earned bachelor’s degrees at USC, as did Walter Gordon, Jr. Even Willis O. Tyler, the Harvard-trained doyen of black litigators, had a USC connection: his niece, Helen Wheeler Riddle ’27 was the first black woman to graduate from the Law School. It is easy to imagine that the early meetings, often held at the Club Alabama next to the Hotel Somerville, might have occasionally sounded like a USC Alumni Association gathering.
After two years in the army, Wright re-established a general practice near Vernon and Central before moving to Beverly Hills, where his clients included the Boys Markets, the Independent Retailers Association of Southern California, and the old Rapid Transit District. While he invested heavily in the commercial activities which served the Los Angeles African-American community – one of his investments was the Los Angeles Sentinel, the oldest continually published black newspaper in the West – Wright’s was a successful practice which both served and yet transcended race and culture.
Reflecting on his gratifying life in the law, and his desire and ability to make such lives possible for others, Cris Wright recently endowed a $2 million scholarship fund at the USC Law School in support of African-American students as well as other students with an interest in serving under-represented communities.
True and Honest Representation
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f the Crispus Attucks Wright Scholarship had been available to students in 1947, Albert Armendariz, a World War II veteran from El Paso, Texas, would certainly have been a recipient. That Armendariz would ever practice law was unlikely. His father commuted daily from his El Paso home to the Mexican city of Juarez, where he worked as a telegraph operator; his mother, professionally trained as a concert pianist, remained at home to raise eight children. Her death when Albert was only nine made economics more pressing than education for the family; following his 1934 graduation from El Paso High School, Armendariz first worked as a shoe salesman, then as an auto mechanic. Drafted at the onset of World War II, he spent four years at Fort Bliss, Texas, in the motor pool.
In 1947, following undergraduate study at Texas Western University, Armendariz, inspired by the legal careers of his maternal grandfather and uncle, enrolled at USC Law School on the G.I. Bill. A sister-in-law living in Los Angeles was willing to provide housing for the young and poor Armendariz family.
Working at odd jobs during his three years in law school provided ample time for Armendariz to ruminate on the meaning of Pendleton Howard’s daily class-opening greeting: “It is now time to ask ourselves some very serious questions.” For Armendariz, the most serious questions would be those concerning Mexican-American civil rights. Even though he was from Texas, Armendariz learned of at least two Mexican-Americans who preceded him at the law school: Manuel R. Ruiz ’30 and fellow student Frank F. Solis ’49, both of whom had practices in the Los Angeles Mexican-American community.
Returning to El Paso after his 1950 graduation, Armen-dariz immediately began his legal practice and civic life. From his neighborhood store-front office, he developed an immigration practice serving Hispanic (his preferred word) clients. From 1976 to 1985, he was an administrative judge in immigration; later he held an appointment on the Texas Court of Appeals.
Equally important to Armendariz has been his life in two Hispanic civil organizations: The League of United Latin-American Citizens and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Actively involved in LULAC since 1951, Armendariz was national president of the organization in 1954 and has since served in many voluntary capacities, the most important of which was as chief legal officer for the LULAC corporation.
Armendariz embraced the notion that the educational and civil rights of Mexican-Americans needed an active legal component. This he helped generate, not only for LULAC, but for and through MALDEF in 1969. With other attorneys, Armendariz helped found the national organization which today maintains its national headquarters in Los Angeles.
From 1968 to 1971, Armendariz served as chairman of the MALDEF board of trustees. During his tenure, MALDEF attracted grants from the Ford Foundation to fund legal scholarships for promising Mexican-American law students. A matching-fund program provided by 100 American law schools, including USC, expanded the reach of the MALDEF scholarship initiative. Armendariz’s work on behalf of MALDEF represents a life of community lawyering, civil engagement, and philanthropy.
The commitment to community both links and distinguishes the legal and civic lives of Albert Armendariz, Crispus Attucks Wright, Frank Chuman and You Chung Hong. Each man overcame significant economic and personal hardships before and while attending law school at USC, and each man faced powerful prejudices, not only within society, but within the legal profession itself. Despite this, their collective perseverance and courage contributed to the reshaping of their social and professional worlds, and through their philanthropic acts, each has directly or indirectly served the USC Law School.
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