Career Journalist Angela Wright Described as Outspoken, Popular

Angela Denise Wright, the former press spokeswoman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas made sexual comments to her, is described by friends and colleagues as an outgoing, attractive woman who was not afraid to take unpopular stands.

Wright’s statement was made to committee staffers and released Sunday night as the committee continued its hearings into allegations that Thomas sexually harassed Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, a former employee of his at the EEOC and Department of Education.

Wright, who was active in GOP politics in the early 1980s, is now an assistant metropolitan editor at the Charlotte Observer.

Richard Oppel, editor of the Observer, described her as “a good, professional editor.” He declined to discuss her statement regarding Thomas, saying “that is a matter that doesn’t involve the Charlotte Observer” because whatever happened occurred before she joined the paper in February, 1990.

Before she worked for the Observer, she was managing editor of the Winston-Salem, N.C., Chronicle, a black newspaper.

Harry Amana, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, said that Wright’s columns in the Chronicle were quite popular among some blacks in the state. “She was rather outspoken in her opinions,” he said. “People in the community responded to it.”

Dennis Schatzman, a reporter for the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black-owned weekly newspaper, who preceded Wright as managing editor of the Chronicle, described her as an attractive woman. “She’s quite pleasing to the eye,” he said.

During her time at the EEOC, Wright was the director of the office of public affairs. She was fired from EEOC by Thomas in 1985.

“Clarence Thomas did consistently pressure me to date him,” she said in her statement. “At one point, Clarence Thomas made comments about my anatomy. Clarence Thomas made comments about women’s anatomy quite often.”

She has told Senate staffers that she was fired after working there for about a year because Thomas felt she wasn’t aggressive enough in firing veteran EEOC employees. However, Thomas told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he found her work unsatisfactory and fired her after she called a male colleague “a faggot.”

Before going to the EEOC, Wright, a registered Republican, worked for the Republican National Committee as a liaison with black media in 1980 and 1981.

From 1981 to 1984, she worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development as a news officer and, later, as its director of media relations. That job sent her to the Ivory Coast, Egypt and Pakistan with private firms and to Jamaica to handle publicity for a Caribbean conference on foreign aid.

After leaving the EEOC, Wright returned to college to finish her incomplete course work for a degree in journalism at the University of North Carolina. She was graduated in December, 1985.

From 1986 to 1987 she worked as deputy director of the National Business League, assisting its membership of small and minority firms in acquiring technical and legislative information about business development.

Paula Newsome, a Charlotte optometrist, said she has known Wright since they attended John G. Hogard High in Wilmington, N.C., in the 1970s.

She said Wright comes from a “a solid, black middle-class home on the south side of Wilmington.”

Newsome recalled that in 1971 Wright was elected homecoming queen, creating quite a sensation because she was the first black to receive the honor at the recently integrated high school. “It was a historic occasion,” Newsome said, noting that Wright won because she was “popular and outgoing.”