A Retired Prosecutor’s Quest for Recognition
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – What is the weight of history?
For Stephanie Wright, it’s as thin as the thinnest, 259-page book that has supported her life for months and set her on an unusual and determined quest for recognition. She appealed to the Justice Department and some of the most senior officials and judges in the federal court system in the Midwest.
None of that has anything to do with what’s in the book. The forgotten thing that bothered her – her name.
Ms. Wright is a federal prosecutor in Iowa who has made history in her own right. She was an assistant United States attorney in the Northern District of Iowa, the first African-American prosecutor in the office. For 24 years, from 1994 until her retirement in 2018, she was the only Black prosecutor in the federal district, which spans the largely rural northern half of the state.
Last year, when she flipped through a new book – “History of the District Court for the Northern District of Iowa (1882-2020)” – Ms. Wright turned to Appendix A. It included a list of 88 assistant U.S. attorneys. Ky has worked in the prosecutor’s office for more than a century. To her shock and dismay, her name disappeared.
The book was published by the Historical Society of the North of Iowa, a volunteer group. Ms. Wright, who was never a member but ordered two copies of the book, sent an email pointing out the omission.
Within minutes, she received an apology from CJ Williams, a federal judge and historic society member, who called the omission “clearly unintentional.” Ms. Wright’s name is the only one removed from the list of assistant US attorneys that has appeared so far.
Judge Williams wrote in an email: “We focused on the content of the book, not the appendices. He added that he was unable to take a call from Ms Wright at the time “because I was on the bench in a jury trial.”
Agitated, Ms. Wright sent another email to the historical society expressing her “shock and disappointment” and demanding action. She asked that an online version of the book would be updated, two repaired hardcover copies would be printed at no cost to her, and newspapers in Iowa published notices that the book had been repaired.
The omission, Ms. Wright wrote, “removed my name from history.”
The online version of the book has since been repaired, but Ms Wright was told it would be “expensive to print a new hardcover version”. No notice will be published in the newspaper.
She is not satisfied.
“I will not be forgotten,” Ms. Wright said in an interview. “This country ignored Black women – Black people – and we didn’t learn about our history until many years later.”
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- MAGA and Martinis: A group of belligerent young Republicans in New York, firmly on the right and friendly to Trump, beware of the establishment of the official GOPmore moderate path.
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- In Florida: National Voting Advocacy Group and NAACP challenge a state law bans the use of electronic signatures on voter registration forms, bringing in a federal lawsuit against the state similar to those pending in Texas and Georgia.
- Phil Murphy: New Jersey’s top election enforcement official sue the governor of the state and three aides for what the official said was an attempt to oust him in retaliation for comments he had made about political fundraising rules.
She was having lunch at a restaurant in Cedar Rapids, home of the Northern District headquarters and where, during Black History Month in February, she paid $4,000 for a billboard on the top. a building in the city center. It featured her in a white dress with her arms crossed and the message: “Stephanie Johnson Wright, First African American Assistant to the United States Attorney, Northern District of Iowa (1994-2018).”
She said the billboard was part of her reaction to being removed from the history books. “I’m not going to be one of the hidden people,” she said.
Ms Wright said one of her two eldest daughters asked her why she was so determined to correct a small line in a confusing book that very few people see. No more than 100 copies of the book were printed, and it was only kept in a handful of Midwestern libraries that were not open to the public.
“Have you seen the movie ‘Hidden Characters’?” she said, referring to Oscar-nominated film about three Black female mathematicians at NASA in the 1960s. “I didn’t even know those women existed. I think there are probably a lot of people who are first in their family, first in this country. But they decided not to speak up. But by doing so, you are preventing others from being inspired and inspired.”
Ms. Wright, 71, grew up in the Ville district of St. Louis, a historic Negro neighborhood, by a single mother. Her father was incarcerated for part of her childhood. As a teenager, she won a scholarship to a Roman Catholic boarding school in Minnesota.
“I was the only black girl in my class at boarding school, which was really great for me because I always felt comfortable around white people,” she said. “I was never threatened.”
After graduating from the University of Missouri, she worked for John Deere in Iowa before attending Northwestern Law School in Portland, Ore., turning 38. She was hired by the United States attorney in Cedar Rapids on the recommendation of a US attorney in Cedar Rapids. a civil rights activist Ms. Wright has worked with.
As a prosecutor, she won the 1997 case of the cross-fire outside the house of an interracial couple. She then specialized in cracking down on businesses that violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.
In May 2022, Ms. Wright sent a four-page letter to the Department of Justice, which oversees the US attorney’s offices.
She wrote that she did not believe her omission in the history books was an accident. She claims “intentional discrimination” against her as a Black woman, which she says is part of a pattern that began when she was an assistant attorney USA.
In the letter, she said she had been transferred to a job overseeing civil rights cases, which she said was “revenge” for her support of a fellow prosecutor. career, who sued the U.S. Attorney’s office for age discrimination after being fired. (The case involved messy internal politics and especially the rarity of a federal judge, Stephanie Rose, taking a stand. The former prosecutor who sued lost the case.)
Ms. Wright wrote to the Department of Justice that she was prevented from filing her own discrimination complaint by a private attorney because it could lead to termination.
Timothy Duax, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, whose tenure as assistant U.S. attorney in office overlaps with Ms. Wright’s, declined to address her specific requests. But in a statement, Mr Duax said his office “does not tolerate unlawful discrimination or harassment of any kind, nor does it unlawfully retaliate against us.” with employees who file such complaints.”
Richard Murphy, a retired prosecutor in the Cedar Rapids office and former treasurer of the historical association, said it was he who compiled the list in question for Appendix A, and Ms. past was an honest mistake, not a small one. or any form of retaliation.
He said he relied on the addendum on a spreadsheet kept by someone who worked in the prosecutor’s office. Mr Murphy said: “Stephanie’s name was not added to the list of people who left the office for any reason. “If there is a fault, blame it all on me. I relied on something incorrect.”
He strongly objected to Ms. Wright’s claim that the omission was intentionally discriminatory. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I feel bad that she clearly feels the need to assert that it was done for ethnic reasons, which is wrong.”
In an unsigned reply to Ms. Wright’s May 2022 letter to the Department of Justice, the Executive Office’s general counsel for the United States Attorneys wrote that there is no basis to suggest that omission is unintentional.
The counsel added that if Ms. Wright wants to pursue charges of “wrongful conduct” at the Iowa prosecutor’s office, she should contact the Justice Department’s Inspector General.
She didn’t do that. Instead, she found a resolution from another source, a judge in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which looks at cases from the Northern District of Iowa.
The judge, Jane Kelly, working with an Eighth Circuit librarian, Eric Brust, arranged in October to print three corrected pages in Appendix A with adhesive backing. They will be distributed to libraries that keep copies of the history books, to post on incorrect lists of assistant U.S. attorneys.
On a chilly Tuesday afternoon, Ms. Wright visited the federal courthouse in Cedar Rapids, a bow-shaped building with a glass façade, to see if the new pages had been glued in. Ms. Wright currently lives with her husband, Charles, a retired supervisor of the Postal Service, in Virginia Beach, Va. Before that, she and her husband made trips to the courts in Des Moines and St. Louis, which also houses historic copies of the Northern County of Iowa.
In the fourth-floor library of the Cedar Rapids courthouse, Hilary Naab, the librarian, had taken the book – a book that was certainly modest for all the anxiety it had caused – off the dictionary shelf and other references. At a table with red-cut hearts and felt flowers—Valentine’s Day has just passed—Miss Wright opened its gold-titled cardboard. She skipped past chapters on judges, prominent cases heard at the district level, and courts, until she read Exhibit A. Its 41 pages list court staff over the decades. century.
Three new pages listing assistant U.S. attorneys have been neatly pasted. For a moment, Mrs. Wright wondered aloud if they could be explicitly added to her visit after she called for an appointment. But she noticed that the edges of the pages were a bit frayed, indicating that they had been there for more than a few days, pressed by the weight of history, in a place now less frequented by most legal research. are all done online.
“I am very happy,” Ms. Wright said.