"It's Showtime!"

A Day With Rick Wright from Newhouse School J-Camp on Vimeo.

By Rylah Orr

Rick Wright talks for a living.

He talks on the radio. He talks while showing off Syracuse University. He even teaches talking on the radio.

Wright is a professor in the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at SU. Among the things he teaches are radio broadcasting, broadcast management and commercial writing. He is also the senior public affairs officer for the New York Naval Militia.

His deep booming voice echoes down the school’s hallways and on the public airwaves.

On the radio, he is “Dr. Rick Wright,” as he describes himself. Wright’s signature phrase is the saying, “It’s show time!” He says it to begin his radio broadcasts, “Old School Sunday” on WPHR-FM, Power 106.9. He’s worked at several radio stations during his career. He worked for Syracuse’s WOLF, an AM rock station and left to work for rival station, WNDR.

“And then I became Rick Wright on WNDR radio,” Wright said.

At Syracuse, he is an unofficial athletic recruiter and goodwill ambassador. Wright’s commanding voice often leads visiting football players from Missouri and New Jersey around the halls of Newhouse to meet colleagues and students. He shows them the radio studio, the TV broadcasting studio and the dean’s office.

But Wright didn’t always have a public voice. He grew up in South Carolina during segregation.

“Many of the African-American schools were never equal in regards to many of the white schools. They had more money and resources,” Wright said. “We were the last of the legal segregation in the South when the Jim Crow laws were in place.”

Jim Crow laws reinforced segregation in the South and denied African Americans their basic civil rights.

He marched in protests to gain civil rights. Wright attended Elizabeth City State University, a historically black college in Elizabeth City, N. C. He was a member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, which organized some protests of unfair business practices that kept out African Americans. Wright hoped to “break down those barriers.”

Demonstrations were not without consequences.

“I got arrested and all the other stuff that goes along with it,” he said.

The president of Elizabeth State University, Walter N. Ridley, was one of Wright’s early mentors. He had an interest in the radio field. He introduced Wright to the radio program at the university.

“He basically opened some real rights for me,” Wright said.

Now Wright teaches his own radio classes at SU. And when he’s not teaching, he’s often shepherding athletic recruits around the halls of SU.

“Each recruiting visit is different, depending on the player, depending on how I feel, regards to trying to establish a level of empathy with the young man or lady who are trying to make a very important decision to decide upon a collage that they’re going to attend,” Wright explained.

He always tells them, “It’s your time. Life goes on.”

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