On this day, in 1949, the United States first celebrated National Freedom Day, the landmark creation of Richard R. Wright.

Born into slavery in Georgia in 1855, Richard Robert Wright attended the Storrs School, which later became Atlanta University, several years after his emancipation. He then entered into Georgia Republican politics. Though he never served as a delegate, he won renown, and was appointed the first president of the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth in 1891. During his tenure, President William McKinley selected him to serve as a major and paymaster for U.S. Army volunteers during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

In his later years, Wright moved to Philadelphia, where he opened two banks and founded the National Freedom Day Association, dedicated to setting aside the first of February to memorialize the signing of the proposal of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States by President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

Wright also served as an advocate for civil rights, penning a momentous letter to President Harry Truman in response to a vicious attack upon decorated World War II veteran Isaac Woodard Jr. by South Carolina police that left Woodward blinded. The letter had a significant effect on the president, who subsequently ordered a federal investigation, and, following the acquittal of the local sheriff by an all-white jury, established a national interracial commission that desegregated the military and the federal government.

It was also Truman who signed National Freedom Day into law on June 30, 1948, one year after Wright died. Though he did not live to see Freedom Day enacted, Richard Robert Wright continues to inform our understanding of liberty, beckoning us to acknowledge that freedom is meaningless unless it is available to all citizens, and to consider what steps we still must take to achieve that goal.

— Rabbi Josh Knobel