A chance encounter with a local trailblazer started Dante Wright on his journey from poverty to the legal profession.
When one of 4-year-old Dante’s older brothers took his bicycle from him, Dante ran after him into the street just as General District Court Judge Gammiel Poindexter was driving home from work.
Poindexter, then two years into her tenure as the first female Black judge appointed to Virginia’s Sixth Judicial Circuit, had commuted past the boys’ Surry County house hundreds of times before stopping her car that day in 1997 to talk to Wright and walk him home.
Wright, now 30 and himself a practicing lawyer, describes his 26-year relationship with Poindexter as having now come “full circle.” She’s become his mentor, adoptive grandmother and now partner at the newly opened Poindexter & Wright law firm, which has offices in Surry and Smithfield.
Wright was born the youngest of seven children to parents who never finished high school. The year Poindexter came into his life, he’d been living with his mother and five siblings. His father was largely absent and his oldest brother, Curtis, had by that time moved away to live on his own.