The debate and outrage at Harvard University over Dr. Claudine Gay’s governance and tenure reminds us of the turmoil around Ewart Guinier’s situation in the late 1960s. Or the more recent throwdown between the institution and Dr. Cornel West, who resigned three years ago, accusing the school of “intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths.” For the moment, let’s examine the story of Professor Guinier since it conforms most directly to the column’s overall aims.
Guinier was born on May 17, 1910, in the Panama Canal Zone to Howard and Marie-Louise Beresford Guinier. His parents were Jamaican immigrants living in a segregated area where his father worked as a lawyer and real estate agent, and his mother a bookkeeper. After his father died in 1919, his mother moved to Boston and Ewart joined her in 1925.
As a teenager, he began attending Boston English High School and by 1929 was a student at Harvard College. As one of the only Black students at the university then, he endured discrimination, exclusion from the dormitory system, and was ruled ineligible for financial assistance. Even without his application for off-campus housing, he was informed that he had been approved. In the classroom, he was often ostracized by his white classmates, but thanks to his friendship with Robert Weaver, later a “Black cabinet” member of FDR’s administration, and esteemed historian Frank Snowden, he received some comfort from the racist experience. Solace also came from his membership in the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
The Great Depression delivered an even larger challenge to his survival on campus and his struggle to meet the cost of tuition. After his sophomore year, he left the school. His move to New York City was in part precipitated by the tuition-free City College which he began attending at night while working as a freight elevator operator at the New York Times building. He graduated summa cum laude in 1935 and later attended Columbia University Teachers College, earning his master’s degree in 1939.
He often combined his educational pursuits with his commitment to labor, particularly during the time he worked at the helm of the Men’s Service Rating Bureau, which was part of the city’s Department of Welfare.
After he passed the Civil Service exam in 1937, he became an examiner in the same department. This was a stepping stone to his appointment to the post of chief of the Civil Service Commission.
From this post, he began his deep involvement in the trade union movement, eventually becoming the first chair of the Rating Bureau of Local, State, County, and Municipal Employees of America (SCMEA). He had other significant leadership stints in the labor division before he began his tenure in the military, mainly in the Pacific. When the United Public Workers came into existence, he served as secretary-treasurer, the second highest-ranked official in the union. In 1951, Guinier wrote that “the U.S. government is the nation’s biggest Jim Crow employer.”
Two years before this assertion, he ran for the Manhattan Borough President on the American Labor Party ticket. His campaign was led by attorney Hope Stevens, who expressed his feelings about Guinier’s bid and that “it would put an end to the lily-white standards of other political parties which have long denied the Negro people of New York political representation in our city government.” His pro-labor, anti-racist policies were not enough to win the race, though he received 38% of the votes cast in the race, losing to the Democratic Party candidate, Robert Wagner.
A year later, the UPW was a victim of the nationwide Red Scare perpetuated by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and was purged from the CIO because of its alleged connections to the Communist Party. In 1953, the union was dissolved.
Guinier was well on his way to prominence in the labor movement when he decided to return to the academic realm at New York University, and by 1959 had earned his law degree. Neither his academic pedigree nor his connections to the Communist Party, kept him out of the labor movement, including Harlem Trade Union Council, which he co-founded with Ferdinand Smith, and the National Negro Labor Council and served as a vice-president. From 1962 to 1968, he was chairman of the Queens Urban League.
Still, it was hard for him to ignore the call to academia, and upon leaving the Brownsville Community Corporation, he became an associate director at the Urban Center at Columbia University. Here he was in the vortex of the dispute about the divide between the university and Harlem neighborhoods, which activists insisted was a segregationist move on the part of the school. In 1969, he began his tenure at Harvard University as a full professor, and subsequently out of the Black students’ demand for Black Studies, was the first chairman of the newly formed Afro American Studies department, a position he held until 1976.
Ironically, it was Dr. Martin Kilson, a Black professor at Harvard, who was Guinier’s main nemesis, and they disagreed on how the study of the Black experience should unfold. Kilson argued that the courses could be included in existing departments, while Guinier took exception to this concept, charging that there was an insufficient number of Black faculty to make this workable. Besides his administrative duties, he taught several courses and was widely sought as a speaker.
In 1980, he retired from Harvard, though he continued to be involved in several important academic and international organizations, including chairing the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. His daughter, Lani, followed in his footsteps as an educator and legal scholar. She was 71 when she died in 2022.
Guinier died on Feb. 4, 1990, of Alzheimer’s disease, at the Veterans’ Hospital of Bedford, Mass. He was 79.