During the Civil Rights Movement, Ms. Wright helped register thousands of voters in Mississippi. She was the first African American female elected official in Mississippi post-Reconstruction. She is a best-selling author of Looking Back to Move Ahead, which chronicles her journey growing up in a small Mississippi town through her work in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. She worked directly with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many other humanitarian activists, both locally and nationally. Her experiences are documented in a 1997 film entitled Standing on My Sisters’ Shoulders.