Annette Gordon-Reed

Forty acres and a mule. The order by Union General William T. Sherman in January 1865, just after the Civil War ended, to offer some recompense to newly freed slaves for the harms they had suffered was a radical, tantalizing promise that never came to be. More than 150 years later, the question of whether nations that benefited from the African slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries bear a responsibility to provide financial reparations for their crimes — as well as the lasting economic, social, and political damage they caused — remains unsettled. Many political and Civil Rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., have tried to gain traction for the idea periodically over the years, without much success...“This is not about retribution and anger, it’s about atonement; it’s about the building of bridges across lines of moral justice,” said Sir Hilary Beckles, a distinguished historian, scholar, and activist from Barbados, during a talk Monday at Harvard Law School...[Kenneth] Mack and [Annette] Gordon-Reed noted the many real-world opportunities in Boston and across the United States that exist right now for HLS students to facilitate getting reparations for black people through the legal system. “All of us derive a present-day benefit from the oppression, the degradation of human beings. And what should we do as an institution to make reparations for that” is what should be on everyone’s mind in thinking broadly about the concept of reparations, said Mack.

At a time when Harvard finds itself debating the ways controversial history is remembered on campus, Caribbean historian Hilary M. Beckles told a Harvard Law School audience the best way to deal with a thorny past is confronting it head on. “There’s no point in burying the legacy and memories,” Beckles said. “Let us bring everything to the surface and find a way forward through all of this.” Beckles was the keynote speaker at a panel discussion on reparatory justice for Caribbean countries that facilitated the slave trade, and was joined by other Harvard professors on the panel in the Law School’s Ames courtroom..Alexander J. Clayborne, a third-year Law School student who has helped organize protests, attended the event and said he found the talk “powerful,” especially as it pertained to both global and current events at Harvard...Professors Annette Gordon-Reed, Kenneth W. Mack, and Vincent Brown also participated in the panel.

...What kind of patriarch did this American founder wish and imagine himself to be? ask two eminent Jefferson scholars. In their fascinating, subtle, and deeply insightful new book, Annette Gordon-Reed, Warren professor of American legal history at Harvard Law School and professor of history, and Peter S. Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, seek to understand, as dispassionately as possible, how Jefferson gave meaning to his existence, how he wished to be perceived by others, how he shaped his private and public lives, and how he reconciled in his own mind his status as a slave-owner with his immortal words that “all men are created equal.”

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow has announced the creation of a committee to research if the school should continue to use its current shield. The shield is the coat of arms of the family of Isaac Royall, whose bequest endowed the first professorship of law at Harvard.

On the heels of an incident of racially-charged vandalism on campus, Harvard Law School Dean Martha L. Minow has appointed a committee to reconsider the school’s controversial seal—the crest of the former slaveholding Royall family that endowed Harvard’s first law professorship in the 19th century...Law professor Bruce H. Mann will serve as the chair of the committee, according to Minow’s email. Mann will be joined by Law professors Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Janet E. Halley, and Samuel Moyn...Two students and an alumnus will also serve on the committee.

(Muslims and Christians do not hate each other , the majority want peace.) An interview with Annette Gordon-Reed.

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has announced its fellows for 2015-2016. The more than 50 men and women include creative artists, humanists, scientists, and social scientists, each pursuing “an ambitious individual project within the Institute’s multidisciplinary community.”...Twelve of the new fellows are Harvard faculty members; their names and the titles of their projects appear below....Christine A. Desan, professor of law, whose teaching covers the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory. She is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism...Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law and of history, Pforzheimer professor at the Radcliffe Institute, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for nonfiction...Intisar A. Rabb, professor of law and director of Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program, who studies criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and Islamic law.

Loretta E. Lynch, who was confirmed Thursday as attorney general, will meet with local police officers nationwide this summer as she tries to strike a new tone for the Justice Department amid a roiling controversy over the use of lethal force, aides said....But her friends and relatives say she has never viewed her job in government as one of a civil rights advocate. “She’s not an ideologue,” Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and longtime friend, said recently. “She’s not going to do things to please some wing. She’s not a caricature of anything. She is a prosecutor.”

The Rev. Lorenzo Lynch was in his living room here, surrounded by photographs of his daughter Loretta, when he first heard the news that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was stepping down and she was on the short list of candidates to replace him...When she graduated law school, Lynch and another Harvard student, Annette Gordon-Reed, both joined the Wall Street law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel as litigation associates. They and another African American woman at the firm called themselves “the triplets” and worked brutal hours. “We often found ourselves sitting in a conference room at 3:00 in the morning eating Chinese food and working on a case,” said Gordon-Reed, now a Harvard law professor. “She’s a Southern steel-magnolia-type person — very, very strong,” Gordon-Reed said. “But she’s also one of the funniest people I know and a good mimic.

Harry Belafonte, an icon of American stage and screen with a lifelong commitment to social activism, recalled his experiences during the civil rights movement at a Chancellor’s Lecture Series event Jan. 13 in Langford Auditorium. Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos and award-winning historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Michael Beschloss joined Belafonte for a far-reaching conversation on the history, legality and politics surrounding the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which marks its 50th anniversary this year...Black legal scholars began assembling cases, including 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, to chip away at segregationist laws and usher in the sweeping social legislation of the 1960s. “But law always has its limitations, so direct action comes in and helps,” Gordon-Reed said. “Law legitimizes things, but they both have to work together.”

New York asked more than 50 historians to respond to a broad questionnaire about how Obama and his administration will be viewed 20 years from now..."The president’s blackness will matter a great deal, mainly because I think it shaped how many Americans viewed him and gave ammunition to his opposition. And on the other hand, I think Obama’s being black will influence the way that young people see the world. Having a black family living in the White House is important symbolically, as it suggests that the United States is not a “white” nation." – Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor at Harvard University and scholar on race, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history for "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family." ... Last week, I had an e-mail exchange with her about race relations in the U.S. after the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed. For a founding father who usually took a sunny view of his nation’s prospects, it was a darkly pessimistic prophesy. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson argued that if – as he hoped – America’s black slaves were one day set free, the result would be conflict and an inevitable descent into racial war. And in the hours after Governor Jay Nixon imposed a night-time curfew on the Missouri town of Ferguson following the killing there of an unarmed teenager by a police officer earlier this month, it is indeed reasonable to wonder whether a form of war (sometimes hot, sometimes cold) has been waged against blacks in America from Jefferson’s time until our own.

The Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and the Carol Pforzheimer Professor of Advanced Studies at the Radcliffe Institute, Annette Gordon-Reed has become the authority not only on the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship but also on the legacy, sensibility, and politics of our brilliant yet hypocritical third president…who owned more than 100 slaves when he declared all men to be equal…My guest is now exploring the more up-to-date lineage of the Hemings family. She then plans a biography of Jefferson that will illuminate his life as a slaveholder. As cases of sexual scandal ensnaring our elected officials persist, Gordon-Reed’s investigative lens is ever relevant, as is her illumination of America’s moral complexity.

A book review by Annette Gordon-Reed. Few if any men were ever better qualified, at least on paper, to serve as president of the United States than John Quincy Adams. A diplomat several times over, lawyer, senator, and secretary of state, he had grown up in a household with parents who had been center stage at the creation of the American union. By example and exhortation, John and Abigail Adams instilled in their precocious and talented son a deep faith in, and enthusiasm for, the American experiment.

Harvard Law School Professor Annette Gordon Reed ’84 -- a recipient of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize in History, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Dorothy And Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, and a National Humanities Medal -- has been appointed to the Charles Warren Professorship of American Legal History.