Mary Herring Wright grew up in Iron Mine, North Carolina where she attended the racially segregated Iron Mine ... for th
Mary Herring Wright Mary Herring Wright grew up in Iron Mine, North Carolina where she attended the racially segregated Iron Mine School. She was about eight years old when she began losing her hearing, and was completely deaf by age ten. In 1935, her family sent her to the North Carolina School for the Blind and Deaf in Raleigh; a state school with African American teachers. Mary graduated in 1941, and she returned to the school that autumn as a teacher. After a year of teaching, Mary moved to Washington, D.C. In 1943, during World War II, she became a clerk for the U.S. Department of the Navy. Working there, she felt content with both the opportunity to become financially self-supporting and to have a good place to live. A few years later, she resigned in order to return to her roots in North Carolina. Mary Herring Wright was awarded an honorary Bachelor of Arts degree from Gallaudet University in May 2004. She was the author of two books. The first, Sounds Like Home, Growing Up Black and Deaf in the South, was published in 1999; the second, Far from Home, Memories of World War II and Afterward, was published in 2005.
