Maggie Wright: 10 Days Occupying Wall Street

A young woman from Noank was photographed protesting as part of Occupy Wall Street, and her picture was on the front page of the New York Post this past weekend.

Maggie Wright, 19, said she rode the bus for two days from where she was traveling in Memphis, Tenn., to take part in the protest. She arrived cold, exhausted and hungry, and didn’t know what to expect, she said. Then she met other protestors in New York’s financial district, ate and spent ten days camped in the park.

On Oct. 14, it rained on the crowd through the night.

She and a group took cover in a stairwell, expecting to be evicted from the park with the masses on Saturday. The following morning before dawn when the rain stopped, she arrived at the park to find everyone still awake. Then they received word that they’d be allowed to stay.

 “Everyone just erupted,” she said.

Sometime, as she was marching in the street with the crowd, a photographer snapped the photo.

Wright lives at home in Noank, although she’s been traveling the last few months. She worked on the docks of Mystic Seaport during the last two summers, and has a college in mind but can’t afford it right now, she said. Her father, Clint Wright, is a self-employed blacksmith. Her mother, Robin Thomas, is a library assistant in the Groton Public Schools.

“I’ve been really passionate about politics ever since I was little,” Maggie Wright said. “It was always a conversation in my house.”

She said she felt a calling to be at Occupy Wall Street, and brought only her backpack and a sleeping bag.

“I feel like America is being run by corporations and the banks and that’s not right to me,” she said. “It’s not democracy. The country should be run by the people. It’s such an uneven distribution of wealth.”

“I can’t even grasp how much they’re making (on Wall Street) because it disgusts me,” she said.

Someday, she said she wants to teach meditation, work as a blacksmith and start her own self-sustaining farm.

She said she was impressed by how organized the support for protestors was; people cooked food, provided medical help, sweatshirts and sleeping bags, and opened their apartments, she said.

She’ll remember Saturday morning most.

“As soon as we turned the corner, I saw that there wasn’t a single sleeping person in that park. It was 4 o’clock in the morning,” she said. “Energy was so high, and it was just really beautiful because I could just feel the determination in everyone.  And it was just really inspiring.”