In commemoration of Black History Month, HLS Professors Lani Guinier and Charles Ogletree ’78 were recognized by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education as two of 28 noteworthy African-Americans who have contributed to the “world of words.”
The women and men on the list are writers, editors, journalists, publishers, trailblazers and change makers including luminaries such as playwright Richard Wright, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien and award-winning author and illustrator Jerry Pinkney. Read the full list on the Maynard Institute website.
Guinier is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law and in 1998 became the first woman of color appointed a tenured professorship at HLS. Previously, Guiner worked at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, was assistant counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and served as special assistant to the assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She has authored many scholarly articles and books including “The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy ,” with Gerald Torres, (Harvard University Press, 2002) and “Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice “(Simon and Schuster, 1998).
Ogletree is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law and director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He is the author and editor of many works, including “From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America” (New York University Press, 2006) and “All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2004).
Established in 1977, the Maynard Institute has helped the nation’s news media reflect America’s diversity by training over 1000 journalists and editors from multiracial backgrounds across the Untied States.