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Sylvia Wright, a former journalist and civil rights advocate, died on March 22 at her home in Southampton. She was 77 and had been diagnosed with brain cancer in February.
Ms. Wright worked as a writer for the weekly news magazine LIFE in the 1960s and 1970s, covering the Civil Rights Movement and the public and private lives of the Kennedy family in the years after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, an event she witnessed. Later in life, she worked part-time as a teacher, sang in renowned gospel choirs, was an avid civil rights advocate, a lover of all things Christmas and an adroit stock market investor.
Ms. Wright was born July 29, 1938, in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, the first daughter of Paul and Vivian Hage. She attended the University of North Dakota, where she came to know James R. Wright, also of Fergus Falls, through a fraternity brother. The couple began dating after college and married in 1962, settling in New York City that same year.
Ms. Wright started work for LIFE magazine’s New York City headquarters as a researcher in 1963 and, after becoming a reporter in 1965, began covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South, the still-struggling national school desegregation effort and poverty and politics in the African-American community. During a trip to Mississippi she and a LIFE photographer registered as journalists with a local police department and were shortly thereafter stopped and held at gunpoint by Ku Klux Klan members, who accused them of being undercover activists, saying her name, Sylvia Wright, was code for “civil rights.”
In the spring of 1968, she and LIFE photographer Bill Eppridge were assigned to travel with New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign as he criss-crossed the country to Democratic primaries. After months of 24-hour life with the candidate and the campaign, she and Mr. Eppridge were awaiting a press conference with Mr. Kennedy following his California primary victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when the senator was shot in a nearby hallway. The pair dashed to the scene, where Mr. Eppridge captured the iconic image of the event, a young busboy kneeling over a dying Mr. Kennedy.
In the weeks, months and years following the second Kennedy assassination, Ms. Wright wrote several intimate profiles of Kennedys and accounts of the private moments and personal reflections on the tumult and tragedy that had engulfed the family. She chronicled the funeral train procession of RFK’s body from New York to Washington D.C. and wrote cover story profiles for the magazine on family matriarch Rose Kennedy and Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, and on Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
In 1976 she chronicled Walter Mondale’s campaign trail movements for President Jimmy Carter’s official inaugural book, written by Alex Haley.
For many years she volunteered for and served as assistant director and director of the Men’s Shelter at Riverside Church, where she was an active member and sang in the gospel choir.
After spending summers in Hampton Bays and Shinnecock Hills for 20 years, she and her husband moved to Southampton in 1987, though she continued to attend and remain active at Riverside Church until the early 2000s. Ms. Wright earned a master’s degree from Southampton College in education and worked in the 1990s as a substitute teacher at several local schools.
She is survived by her husband of 54 years, Jimmy Wright; a sister, Dianne Bumpus, husband Phil and their daughter Jody, all of Kansas City; and her son, Michael Wright, a reporter for The Press News Group.
Services were held at Southampton United Methodist Church, where she was a member, on March 30.
Memorial donations may be made to the Southampton United Methodist Church, 160 Main Street, Southampton, NY 11968.
on Mar 28, 2016