Wright was born in LaGrange, Georgia. His father, Ceah Ketchan Wright, was born a slave but obtained formal education, finishing medical school as valedictorian but later giving up his medical practice to be a Methodist minister. Ceah died shortly after Louis's birth and his mother, a sewing teacher named Lula Tompkins, remarried in 1899. Also a physician, Louis's step-father, William Fletcher Penn, was the first African-American to graduate from Yale School of Medicine. Penn, who became a prominent doctor in Atlanta and was the first African-American to own an automobile in the city, had a strong influence on Louis both as a physician and through the racism Louis watched him endure.