Annette Gordon-Reed

University President Drew G. Faust has formed a “review committee” to determine the exact “sequence of events” leading to the forcible arrest of a black undergraduate April 13 and to undertake a “systematic examination” of a wide variety of Harvard policies. “The committee will start by determining the sequence of events leading to the student’s events,” Faust wrote in an email to students Monday. The results of that determination will then "inform a more systematic examination of opportunities for improvement across a range of institutional activities," Faust wrote...Harvard Law School and History professor Annette Gordon-Reed will chair the committee, according to Faust’s email. The group will include six other individuals including professors at the Business School, Kennedy School, Graduate School of Education, and Medical School, as well as a House faculty dean...BLSA has called the incident an instance of police brutality, and Cambridge Mayor Marc C. McGovern and Faust later called the incident “disturbing.” Harvard Law professors Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and Dehlia Umunna, who lead the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute, are now legally representing the student.

Fifty years ago the murder of a Baptist minister turned Civil Rights giant shook the nation. Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn...We asked a group of Harvard scholars to reflect on King’s life, death, and legacy. Historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalled where they were when they heard about the assassination...Gordon-Reed, 9 years old in 1968, was with her mother at the home of one her friends “when her son came into the room and told us that King had been assassinated.”...Gordon-Reed said her mother and father “were not surprised” by King’s murder. “It was clear that he was making lots of people angry. The possibility of violence was always present given all that was at stake.”

Harvard University’s next president will be Lawrence S. Bacow, a former president of Tufts University and a top academic officer at M.I.T., who was chosen for his diplomatic and leadership skills at a time when higher education is under fire, the university announced on Sunday...Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard professor of legal history who is known for her scholarship on Thomas Jefferson and his relationship with Sally Hemings, his slave, said Mr. Bacow was a good choice. “Larry has impressive credentials, numerous ties to Harvard, and from what I know of him, he has great values, including a commitment to diversity,” she said.

The Declaration of Independence doesn’t mince words when it states that “all men are created equal.” And yet the country’s other foundational document – The Constitution – protected the most unequal of institutions in slavery. Harvard Law Professor Annette Gordon-Reed joins us to talk about how America has struggled since its founding to reconcile these conflicting ideas. Her essay “America’s Original Sin” appears in Foreign Affairs magazine.

A book review by Annette Gordon-Reed. The title of Hillary Clinton’s memoir of her unsuccessful campaign for the presidency, What Happened, has no question mark at the end, although many people around the world might reflexively add one. Clinton’s defeat surprised—stunned—many, including, as is clear from her recollections, Clinton herself. The majority of polls of the likely electorate indicated that she was headed for a nearly certain win, although her prolonged struggle for the Democratic nomination against a wild-haired, septuagenarian socialist from Vermont was a blinking sign of danger ahead. A significant number of voters were in no mood to play it safe, and the safe choice was what Clinton far too confidently offered in both the primaries and the general election.

An article by Annette Gordon-Reed. It promised to be a spectacle in a period that had seen its share of them. Three years after the end of a bloody civil war that had sundered the Union, and nearly three years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the government of the United States had triggered the most serious process in the constitutional mechanism: the power of impeachment. On February 24, 1868, the House of Representatives voted along party lines, 126 to 47, to impeach President Andrew Johnson for having committed “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Days later, a House committee drew up nine articles of impeachment against the 17th president...The confrontation between Johnson and the men who wanted to remove him from office, the so-called Radical Republicans, was a fight over the future direction of the United States; a fight with implications that reverberate to this day.

An article by Annette Gordon-Reed. The documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country’s beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States’ original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually plunged it into civil war.

A book review by Annette Gordon-Reed. It is no surprise that the election of the first black president of the United States would occasion much thinking, writing and talking about the subject of race in America...At the same time, how galling it was for the not insignificant number of white Americans who fervently believed that the US began as a country for white people, and should forever remain so. The president of the United States serves as a symbol of the nation; America’s face and voice to the world. All the reasons why many saw Obama’s election as evidence of the country’s endless capacity for adjustment and renewal, an occasion for pride, were for others evidence of America’s degradation, a source of intolerable shame and anger. Something had to be done. What was done, Ta-Nehisi Coates says in We Were Eight Years in Power, the book of essays that follows his bestselling and influential Between the World and Me, was to seek to erase with extreme prejudice the effects of the country having lived under a black president by electing the man Coates dubs in the book’s final essay “The First White President” (Trump’s “ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power”).

Today is the opening day of the Supreme Court's fall term. Harvard law and history professor Annette Gordon-Reed is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and this hour in a Chautauqua Lecture she explores the origins, and the evolution, of the nation's highest court. Alexander Hamilton called it "the least dangerous" branch of government. She titled her lecture, "The Supreme Court: Hamilton's vision vs. reality."

Vice President Mike Pence defended the diminished role of Washington in the latest health care bill introduced in the Senate by citing ardent anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson..."Thomas Jefferson said, ‘Government that governs least governs best,’ " Pence said. "I mean, the question that people ought to ask is, who do you think will be more responsive to the healthcare needs in your community? Your governor and your state legislature, or a congressman and a president in a far off nation’s capital?" It must be nice to have Jefferson on your side — except Jefferson didn’t say it. "This comes up a lot," said Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard legal history professor who has written extensively about Jefferson.

...Law dean John Manning said at a dedication ceremony Tuesday that the law school should be open about its origins and ties to the slave trade. “Our school was founded with wealth generated through the profoundly immoral institution of slavery,”...The text of the plaque was drafted by history and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, who has written extensively on Thomas Jefferson’s slaves...Gordon-Reed noted during the dedication ceremony on Tuesday that the memorial does not include the names of the slaves whose toil helped fund the law school’s founding, because many of their names are unknown. “The words are designed to invoke all of their spirits and bring them into our minds and our memories with the hope that it will spur us to try to bring to the world what was not give to them: the law’s protection and regard, and justice.” But some slave names were recorded in documents, which were read aloud at the dedication by law professor Janet Halley.

Midway through the list of names was when the crowd fell fully silent. Some 300 people, suddenly pinned in place, stood motionless in a half-circle around the outdoor podium where Janet Halley, Royall professor of law, was reading out the names of slaves who’d once belonged to Isaac Royall Jr., the eighteenth-century sugar-plantation owner whose fortune endowed Halley’s professorship and helped establish Harvard Law School...Inside Wasserstein Hall earlier in the evening, listeners had heard some of that complicated history from Warren visiting professor of American legal history Daniel Coquillette. The author of On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century, he spoke not only about Royall, a brutal slave owner whose plantation in Antigua was notorious (he kept a 500-acre farm in Medford, too), but also about the school’s connections to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793—which most faculty members at the time strongly supported, Coquillette sai...After Coquillette’s remarks—and a panel discussion that followed, with Halley, Warren professor of American legal history Annette Gordon-Reed, Klein professor of law Randall Kennedy, and Schipper professor of law Bruce Mann—audience members filed out into the courtyard to see the new memorial revealed.

As part of Harvard University’s efforts to recognize its early ties to slavery, officials yesterday unveiled a memorial to honor the enslaved people whose work helped found Harvard Law School...Recognizing the legacy of slavery at the Law School is important for coming to terms with the past and for reminding future lawyers of their duty to make the legal system wiser and fairer, said John F. Manning, the School’s Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and professor of law...[Annette] Gordon-Reed, who has written extensively about slavery and who drafted the words on the plaque, said the memorial doesn’t contain names because it’s impossible to know the identities of all the Africans the Royalls enslaved in Antigua and Medford, whose work built much of the wealth used to found the Law School...In a touching moment during the ceremony, Janet Halley, the Royall Professor of Law, who has spoken openly about the connections between her chair and slavery, read aloud the names of those enslaved who were found listed in the Royalls’ records.

Harvard Law School unveiled a memorial dedicated to slaves owned by the Royall family, whose donations helped endow the institution, at an event Tuesday evening. The plaque, which sits on a rock in the plaza between Langdell Hall and the Caspersen Student Center, reads, “In honor of the enslaved whose labor created wealth that made possible the founding of Harvard Law School. May we pursue the highest ideals of law and justice in their memory.” University President Drew G. Faust, newly appointed Dean of the Law School John F. Manning, and Law School professors Annette Gordon-Reed and Janet E. Halley each spoke at the dedication...Adrian D. Perkins, a member of the school’s student government, said seeing the monument gave him “profound happiness” as a student leader and African American student. He said the student government is planning a number of ways to address racial concerns on campus this year.

An essay by Annette Gordon-Reed. Sally Hemings has been described as “an enigma,” the enslaved woman who first came to public notice at the turn of the 19th century when James Callender, an enemy of the newly elected President Thomas Jefferson, wrote with racist virulence of “SALLY,” who lived at Monticello and had borne children by Jefferson. Hemings came back into the news earlier this year, after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced plans to restore a space where Hemings likely resided, for a time, at Monticello.

An interview with Annette Gordon-Reed. President Trump has asked if the U.S. should take down statues of slave-owning Founding Fathers. Scott Simon speaks with historian Annette Gordon-Reed about their differences from Confederate leaders.