Harlem and established ties to the Harlem Hospital, where he was the first African-American on the surgical staff. Dr. Wright's implementations at Harlem Hospital were incredibly significant. He addressed the institution's issues of professionalism and quality of standards, and made the appropriate changes. Wright's additions gained the attention of the nation, and his revisions were eventually implemented into many hospitals nationwide. In 1929 he was also appointed to serve as the first African-American police surgeon with the New York Police Department. In his thirty years at the hospital he started the Harlem Hospital Bulletin, headed the team that first used chlortetracycline on humans, founded the hospital's cancer research center, and earned a reputation as an expert on head injuries. He was a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American Medical Association. Civil rights activism and leadership Throughout his life Wright involved himself in civil rights efforts, beginning in college when he missed three weeks of school to join picket lines protesting D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a film controversial for its sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan. At Harvard he insisted on equal treatment when a professor prevented him from delivering white patients' babies. He joined the NAACP after medical school and remained involved with the organization for the rest of his life, eventually serving as chairman of its national board of directors. Wright's work at the NAACP did not go unnoticed. For the better part of a decade, he wrote multiple columns in The Crisis, the NAACP's magazine publication. The majority of Wright's work dealt with issues that are still brought up by modern black authors, such as Harriet A. Washington. Wright challenged the false beliefs that because of their biology, black people are more susceptible to infectious diseases—such as syphilis—than other races. He was a frequent leader in the struggle for integration, especially in medicine. In 1920, early in his tenure at Harlem Hospital, he played a key role in fighting the precedent in New York whereby African-American doctors and nurses were barred from serving in municipal hospitals. He actively opposed segregated hospitals, including a successful effort in 1930 to stop the construction of a new such facility proposed by the Rosenwald Fund. In working towards equality in medicine and medical education, he advocated for raising standards for black medical students, leading to some pushback from peers who had become used