{"value"=>"<p>Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1910, the son of Jamaican immigrants, Ewart Guinier was known throughout his life for his powerful and passionate oratory and for his courage and integrity. His varied career as a labor leader, a former candidate for the Borough of Manhattan Presidency, and the first chairman of Harvard University's Department of Afro-American Studies, reflected a constant and unequivocal commitment on behalf of the disfranchised.</p> <p>Guinier's father, Howard Guinier, was a lawyer and a real estate agent. His mother, born Marie-Louise Beresford, worked as a bookkeeper. At the time, the Canal Zone was segregated and only United States citizens could send their children to the English language schools. Thus when he was four, Guinier and two other siblings were sent to school in Jamaica. In 1916, his father died; his mother remarried in 1919 to \"Papa Johnny\", a \"silver\" worker on the Canal Zone (lower wages or silver, as opposed to gold, were paid to non-whites). This second marriage produced five additional children. In the early 1920s Guinier's mother migrated to Boston and in 1925 sent for the three older children who were attending school in Jamaica. Her husband joined her the following year after being discharged and blacklisted for his participation in a strike against the unequal treatment of black workers in the Panama Canal Zone.</p> <p>Enrolled in English High School after his arrival in Boston, Guinier maintained an A average and graduated with honors in 1929. He was the chief editor of his high school newspaper and won three prizes for outstanding scholarship and excellence in English, the highest number of awards ever received at that school. While still in high school, he worked during the summer as a line man on boats travelling between Boston and New York. Eating and sleeping on the boats, Guinier saved most of his earnings toward college. He was accepted by Dartmouth College with a full scholarship, and Harvard College, without funding, ostensibly because he had neglected to submit a photograph with his application. Although deeply disappointed, Guinier enrolled in Harvard College in 1929 on the advice of his high school guidance counselor and other advisors. Isolated and ostracized by students (including his former high school classmates) and faculty alike because of his race, lacking in funds, and constrained by Harvard's discriminatory dormitory practices to commute as a day student from nearby Roxbury, he left Harvard in 1931. The only bright spot in his Harvard years were his friendships with black upper classmen William Hastie, Robert Weaver and Frank Snowden, and his membership in the black fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha in 1930.</p> <p>The contrast between the acceptance by his high school teachers and classmates and his success as a student at a predominately white institution, and his two years at Harvard where he experienced the harsh realities of racism and discrimination, made a profound impression on the young Guinier which equipped him for his later struggles against American racism. Reflecting on this experience in later years, Guinier was certain that his application had been complete and that Harvard had denied him a scholarship because they had already admitted a black freshman on scholarship. He suspected that the admissions officers felt that one black freshman was enough (Susan Gordon interview with Ewart Guinier, \"Trapped at Harvard\", Draft/Chapter 3, p. 2. For a fuller treatment of Guinier's undergraduate years at Harvard College see Susan Gordon interview, pp. Box 9, folder 10.)</p> <p>After Harvard, Guinier moved to New York, living in Harlem, where he worked as a freight elevator operator at the New York Times while attending evening classes at the City College of New York. He married Doris Cumberbatch, a school teacher, in 1933, with whom he had one child, Clothilde, and began working as a salesman for the Harlem Research Lab, a black-owned distributor of medical supplies which was launched the same year by two Alpha brothers. He graduated cum laude from City College in 1935 and completed his master's degree at Columbia University's Teachers' College in 1939.</p> <p>During the Depression, Guinier was hired as the head of the Men's Service Rating Bureau, an office of the Department of Welfare, which assisted unemployed men in finding food and shelter. This new office came into being after the so-called Harlem Riots of 1935, which were caused in part by job discrimination in the Harlem commercial district on 125th Street. Mayor Laguardia, responding to an Urban League proposal, agreed to hire blacks in the Welfare Department in proportion to the African-American population of New York City. Two years later, Guinier passed the Civil Service examination and was appointed as an Examiner at the Department of Welfare, and subsequently as the Chief of the Civil Service Commission in charge of rating procedures for new recruits and for promotion in the civil service.</p> <p>Guinier had been introduced to the trade-union movement in 1926. The black crew on the boats he had worked on had gone on strike in protest of separate and unequal eating arrangements on board, and had won some concessions. His earliest impressions of trade- unionism, however, were mostly negative due to the fact that union men in his family usually lost their jobs, and because of the low opinion among blacks in general toward the American Federation of Labor and the discriminatory practices of its segregated craft unions. At the Rating Bureau, Guinier and the other black employees had been hired on a temporary basis, but had organized themselves as a local of the State, County and Municipal Employees of America (SCMEA) and were subsequently allowed to take an examination for permanent status. Later, in the mid 1930s, the New York locals led by Abram Flaxer split from the SCMEA and joined the newly formed Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO) as the State, county and Municipal Workers union (SCMU). Guinier was the first chairman of the Rating Bureau local, and later served as the chairman of the SCMU New York State branch. In 1946, the United Public Workers union (UPW) was founded in 1946 through a merger of the Washington-based Bureau of Engraving and the SCMU.</p> <p>During his tour of duty in Hawaii during World War II, Guinier married Eugenia Paprin, a teacher of Speech, Drama and English from New York who had been appointed director of the Labor Canteen in Honolulu. The two met during a planning meeting for the Canteen, which had been organized by representatives of several trade unions to combat racist attitudes caused by the U. S. military presence on the island. Their wedding in the Fall of 1945 was attended by hundreds of Canteen members. The new couple returned to New York after the war, where their three daughters, Lani, Sary and Marie-Louise were born.</p> <p>In the 1949 elections for the Borough of Manhattan presidency, the American Labor Party (ALP) chose to run a black candidate, and picked Guinier as a likely winner because of his wide constituency in the labor movement and among black civic and fraternal organizations, as well as his passion, integrity, and commitment to the democratic process to represent the needs and aspirations of working men and women of all races. Guinier campaigned on the need for black representation on the Board of Estimate which he called the \"real governing body of the City of New York.\" He polled 96, 000 votes, or nearly one third of the ballot, against the winner, Robert Wagner, the Liberal and Democratic parties' candidate. The experience he gained during this campaign was applied two years later in orchestrating a strong grassroots campaign in favor of Captain Hugh Mulzac's candidacy for the Queens Borough presidency. The previous year, as chairman of the ALP's Harlem Council, he had also participated in W. E. B. DuBois's nominal campaign for the U. S. Senate. Guinier also served in 1952 on the Committee for the Election of a Negro State Senator, which helped elect an independent Democrat, Julius Archibald, as the first African American in the New York State Senate. Guinier's strong campaign in 1949 and his continued advocacy for black representation on the Board of Estimate account, in part, for the selection of black candidates by all four major parties for the Manhattan Borough presidency elections in 1953.</p> <p>Following his discharge from active military service (1942-1946), Guinier was elected International Secretary-Treasurer at the second UPW convention in 1948. The UPW had an estimated membership of over 75, 000 workers in 1947 and was active in 27 states. Blacks accounted for one third of total membership. The union's more lasting achievements were in fighting discrimination against non-white civil service employees in federal agencies and in the Panama Canal Zone. Shortly after the war, the once militant CIO gradually abandoned its commitment to civil rights and full equality for blacks, and began undermining the UPW's efforts in that direction. The Public. Record, UPW's official organ, denounced the CIO in 1949 for enforcing Jim Crow practices within its own ranks, and accused CIO officials of discouraging prospective members from joining UPW and of raiding existing UPW locals. Guinier and Thomas Richardson, the chairman of UPW's Anti-Discrimination Committee, complained that the CIO had betrayed UPW efforts to bring charges before the Fair Employment Practice Commission against the Treasury Department and other federal institutions. By 1950, the UPW fell prey to red-baiting and was expelled from the CIO, along with ten other radical unions. A virtual exodus of individual members and locals followed. The UPW was dissolved in February 1953.</p> <p>Guinier was one of the founding members of the National Negro Labor Council in October 1951. As chairman of its Greater New York chapter, he helped organize picket lines and demonstrations to pressure New York hotels and restaurants into hiring blacks and Latino immigrants as waiters, bartenders, white collar and skilled maintenance workers. Guinier seems to have distanced himself from an increasingly right-wing trade-union movement, however, after the dissolution of the UPW, opting instead for local electoral politics and grassroots community organizing. In 1953, he joined former Harlem assemblyman Robert Justice in forming the Harlem Affairs Committee; a non-partisan group which pressed for full representation of blacks at all levels of city and state government. The Committee organized rallies, petition campaigns, voter registration drives and other events, and was instrumental in Hulan Jack's election as Manhattan's first black Borough president in 1953. Later, in 1962, he helped organize the Jamaica Coordinating Council, a coalition of some fifty churches, business and civic organizations, lobbying for greater community involvement in the redevelopment of Southern Queens. He also served as chairman of the Queens Urban League from 1962 to 1968. During this period, he was primarily employed as a life insurance salesman and as a real estate broker and developer.</p> <p>Guinier continued his education at New York University's School of Law and was awarded an LL. M. degree in 1959. He passed the New York State Bar the same year, but was refused admission by that organization's character committee. That decision was only reversed in the 1980s. Guinier was hired in 1965 as executive director of the Brownsville Community Council, which he reorganized as one of Brooklyn's antipoverty agencies. In 1968 he was appointed Associate Director of the newly founded Urban Center at Columbia University, an institute designed to help solve the growing antagonism between the University and the Harlem community, caused in part by Columbia's plan to build a private gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park.</p> <p>Guinier at Harvard</p> <p>In the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in April 1968, black students throughout the country increased their demands for a field of study that would project black values into the academic experience. Their tactics ranged from study groups and sits - in to strikes and takeovers of university centers. Members of the Association of African and Afro-American Students at Harvard and Radcliffe (Afro) held a vigil on the steps of Memorial Church five days after King's death and issued a manifesto, \"Four Requests on Fair Harvard\", calling for the creation of a degree granting black studies program. Harvard responded by appointing a joint faculty and student committee. In January 1969, this committee issued its report, known as the Rosovsky Report, which was adopted the following month at a meeting of the Faculty Senate. Franklin Ford, dean of the Faculty of Art and Sciences (FAS), subsequently appointed a Standing Committee on Afro-American Studies composed of seven faculty members. A Search Committee of three faculty members and three students was also appointed to find candidates with \"competence and national reputations\", though perhaps lacking in \"normal academic credentials\".</p> <p>On April 9, 1969, the Standing Committee released a three year plan, with the recommendation for an interdepartmental program which would offer a joint concentration with another field of study. The black students at Harvard rejected this plan as a violation of the spirit of the Rosovsky Report. Afro called on all black students to go on strike and joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in an alliance which resulted in an eight point demand on the university, including the call for an independent black studies program. At the same time, Afro enlisted faculty support in drafting a counter-proposal on the future form of black studies at Harvard, which was adopted by the Faculty Senate on April 22, 1969.</p> <p>Highly recommended by a Harvard Overseer and former classmate there, Guinier had come to Harvard to discuss an appointment with the Business School. Meeting by chance with the Search Committee, he won acceptance with his frank assessment that the university, as an American institution, was inherently racist. His subsequent appointment as Chairman of the African American Studies Department with an honorary Ph. D. and tenure was supported by both students and faculty. Guinier quickly established himself as a skilled administrator whose style was both firm and thoughtful, but did not at first challenge the administration. The department, by his own account, received adequate support in its first year under president Pusey and dean Franklin Ford. In time, however, it became evident that departmental goals and those of the administration were poles apart. The administration wanted the African American studies department to seek legitimacy through joint appointments with traditional departments while the department preferred legitimacy in its own right. And although Harvard seemed inclined to implement some promises to students, academic initiatives from the department were challenged, and control of this vital area remained in the administration's hands.</p> <p>The presence of students on its Executive Committee and on the Standing Committee to Develop Black Studies, together with students' demands for a \"black perspective in history\" and institutional accountability to the black community, disturbed many faculty and administrators, most of whom doubted that a serious field of academic study could be devised in partnership with students. Guinier agreed with the students, and thought their desire for empowerment was not unreasonable, a view shared by numerous professors in the sixties. Given such divergence in perspectives and goals, however, controversy emerged in the second year of Guinier's tenure which was attended by the withdrawal of adequate financial and other forms of support.</p> <p>Harvard had called for scholars with national reputations for tenure in the department; the students insisted, additionally, on commitment. (When the department recommended an African scholar, Ephraim Isaac, for tenure, the Standing Committee refused to endorse the recommendation.) These conflicting visions quickly withered the little good will initially enjoyed by the program and its chairman. The Search Committee for Tenure failed to attract acceptable candidates and Guinier remained the sole tenured member of the department throughout his entire chairmanship.</p> <p>An eight - member Committee to Review the department of Afro - American Studies was appointed by President Derek Bok in October 1971. Led by Judge Wade Hampton McCree, a Harvard Overseer serving on the U. S. Court of Appeals in Detroit, the Committee was mandated to evaluate the work of the Standing Committee, the department and its Executive Committee, and to make recommendations on the recruitment of teaching staff, student participation in decision making bodies, curriculum development, departmental procedures, and the proposed DuBois Institute initially envisaged by the Faculty Senate as a research component of the department. Guinier complained that the procedure followed in the selection of the Review Committee was in itself a violation of the spirit of the 1969 Faculty Senate resolution which recommended that the review procedure take place in consultation with the department's Executive Committee.</p> <p>Coming from polar perspectives, disagreements could be expected. Released in October 1972, the report of the Review Committee recommended that Afro-American studies be offered along the lines of a joint concentration with another department and with a narrower focus on Afro-American issues. Professors Martin Kilson and Orlando Patterson, supporters of Harvard's official position, praised the report. Dr. Guinier, countered that courses on African history were relevant to the black experience in America because Afro-American history did not begin with slavery; further, that joint concentration with another department, hardly a criterion for departments at Harvard, would reduce the department to second class status. The Faculty Council meeting on January 16, 1973 turned down a Kilson resolution for joint concentration, but voted to restructure the DuBois Institute on a university-wide basis and to limit student participation in the running of the department. These and other changes were postponed, however, until new tenured faculties were recruited.</p> <p>Also in October 1972, the Afro-American Studies Department issued a \"First Three Years\" report to sum up its accomplishments and to voice its criticism of Harvard for what \"appears to have been a concerted effort by some to either diminish the department's influence or to make it black in name, but white and racist in orientation\". To its credit, the department listed the development of a meaningful curriculum, the graduation of its first fifteen concentrators and the more than 2, 000 students who had enrolled in its courses. The report was favorably received in the black press and within the black studies community, but went largely ignored within Harvard.</p> <p>The department was submitted to another review procedure in 1975, by a Visiting Committee of the Board of Overseers chaired by Lois Dickson Rice, a former member of the Review Committee. Other Visiting Committee members included Edgar A. Toppin from the Department of History at Virginia State College, Bernard Harleston from Tufts University, Dr. Eleanor Holmes Norton, then chairperson of the New York City Human Rights Commission, and Dr. Victor Uchendu, director of the African Studies Program at the University of Illinois. Guinier delivered a paper, \"Blacks at Harvard: Reflections\" at a meeting with the Visiting Committee in March 1975 in which he complained that unrelenting hostility toward the department from the university at large was responsible for a \"certain demoralization\" finally setting in, \"touching even our most dedicated and accomplished scholars\". Removal of the DuBois Institute from the department was, he noted, \"the quickest way to deal a death blow to Afro-American Studies\". In its fifth year of existence, Guinier still remained the department's only tenured member. Pointing to what he termed \"the endurance of a racist spirit within the American scientific community, he added that \"the time for silence has ceased\" and that \"it was time publicly to mount a systematic defense of Afro - American studies\".</p> <p>The department also initiated some reviews of its own, including a departmental needs assessment for the 1973-74 academic year, and a 1975 all day review attended by faculty, concentrators and black organizations at Harvard.</p> <p>The DuBois Institute</p> <p>The Standing Committee to Develop the Afro-American Studies Department led the initial efforts to launch a research institute of Afro-American studies at Harvard. The Committee's Progress Report issued in September 1969 included a Prospectus recommending that a tenured member of AASD be the director of the Institute. The Standing Committee also envisaged developing the Institute as part of a multi-university consortium in collaboration with Boston University and other schools in the Boston-Cambridge area. In early 1970, Harvard president Nathan Pusey appointed Guinier chair of a university-wide committee to design the framework and to raise funds outside of the university for the Institute. This committee was never convened however, partly because Guinier disagreed with the university-wide concept.</p> <p>FAS dean John Dunlop and faculty members teaching courses on the black experience in other departments favored an independent, university-wide institute. Guinier and a majority of the department's faculty and concentrators wanted a direct link between the two black entities at Harvard. Their reasons ranged from wanting some involvement in the development of research on black topics, to the possibility of training future African-American scholars to teach in the department and at other universities. In addition, the practical consideration of splitting scarce funds and the resulting competition, it was feared, would be detrimental to the department.</p> <p>In April 1973, President Bok appointed a new committee chaired by his special assistant Walter Leonard to chart the development of the Institute. The eight-member committee, which included Guinier and Orlando Patterson, submitted a report to President Bok in December 1973. Guinier, in a letter to Bok, objected to the report on both procedural and substantive grounds, arguing that the document constituted \"the basis for a split of interest between the department of Afro-American Studies and the proposed DuBois Institute.\" His objections were rejected. A well organized petition drive sponsored by the United Committee of</p> <p>Third World Organizations was also to no avail. The petition asked that no action be taken \"until representatives of the Harvard black community\" had an opportunity to \"negotiate the specifics of that Institute\".</p> <p>Guinier was henceforth excluded from further planning regarding the Institute. He was not included in a twelve-member Board of Advisers appointed in September 1974, presumably because he was \"not interested in the development of the Institute in its present concept\" (Leonard). Dean Rosovsky also dissolved the Afro-American Search Committee, of which Guinier was a member, around the same time. Preston N. Williams was appointed Acting Director of the Institute in 1975. The following year, Guinier went on sabbatical leave and was replaced as chairman by Eileen Southern, who had been appointed in 1975 with a joint tenure in the Music and Afro-American Studies departments. He remained in the department as a half-time faculty member, teaching either one term a year or half-time throughout the year, until his retirement in June 1980 under the mandatory age policy then in effect at Harvard. In summing up those Harvard years, Professor Sterling Stuckey, the Melville critic, wrote that Guinier's handling of matters during this critical period would remain an inspiration to all those who knew the nature of that struggle and to future generations of black scholars.</p> <p>After his retirement, Guinier became the national chairman of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship Council, an organization with twenty chapters across the country, dedicated to the promotion of detente and peaceful coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union. Feeling that race relations had become the most important issue of the day he accepted this position in light of the organization's pledge to make the fight for full equality for all oppressed minority groups one of the primary considerations of its program of action. Guinier went into full retirement after 1985. Efforts to write an autobiography were circumvented by illness.</p> <p>Ewart Guinier never saw himself as a radical, a term he associated with \"someone who has given up on society.\" \"I consider myself a person who analyzes a situation, gets the facts, and participates in activities that I perceive to be in the interests of people, especially black people\", he confided to an interviewer after his retirement. Professor Hollis Lynch who knew him at Harvard asserted that Guinier was \"ideally suited\" to head the Afro-American Studies Department. Lynch also paid tribute to \"his life-long devotion to the principles of humanism\" and referred to him as \"a soldier in the trenches fighting to expand American democracy.\" Ewart Guinier died in 1990.</p>"}
{"value"=>"<p>The Ewart Guinier Papers document Guinier's professional and political career as a progressive labor leader and community organizer from 1938 to 1962, and his role in the founding and development of Harvard University's Afro-American Studies Department from 1969 to 1975. Divided into 7 series and 26 subseries, the collection chronicles in substance the origin, administration and curriculum of one of the leading black studies programs in the United States. The present arrangement follows Guinier's original order as closely as possible.</p>"}
{"value"=>"<p class='list-head'>The Ewart Guinier papers are arranged in ten series:</p>\n<ul class='arrangement series-descriptions'>\n<li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280239'>Personal Papers</a></div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280296'>Labor and Politics</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>This series documents Guinier's career as Secretary-Treasurer of the United Public Workers union (UPW), his association with the American Labor Party as a candidate for the Manhattan Borough presidency in 1949, and his work in the 1950s and early 1960s with the Harlem Affairs Committee and the Jamaica Coordinating Council. The series consists primarily of correspondence, articles and speeches by Guinier, minutes and reports of UPW's Executive Council, publications and newspapers clippings. The correspondence is scant and relates mostly to the 1947 Loyalty Act and its impact on labor and blacks. A typed report on UPW work in the South entitled \"The Meaning of the South to the Labor and Progressive Movement of the United States\" is also located in the correspondence file.</p> <p>Guinier's articles written during this period and present in this series were published in <em render=\"underline\">March of Labor</em>. <em render=\"underline\">The National Guardian</em> and <em render=\"underline\">New York Teacher News</em>. His speeches usually relate to the campaign for a permanent Fair Employment Practice act in the late 1940s and 1950s, and include his 1948 statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Mundt-Nixon Bill. The Speech file also includes the minutes of a February 1952 UPW executive board meeting with extensive verbatim comments by Abraham Flaxer, Guinier and other participants on the CIO expulsion of radical unions, on African-American unemployment, and the Negro Labor Council.</p> <p>At its peak, UPW membership came from three different constituencies: the Welfare Bureau and other social service agencies in New York City, the Bureau of Engraving in Washington, D. C., and the Silver Workers (non-white labor force) in the Panama Canal Zone. Materials on these three areas are located in extensive printed matter files ranging from 1946 to 1955. Additional printed matter also exists on the 1950 CIO expulsion of the UPW, on the Harlem Trade Union Council, the Negro Labor Committee and the National Negro Labor Council.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280348'>General Correspondence</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Arranged chronologically, the substantive part of this series deals with Guinier's tenure as chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard. Letters preceding that period relate to business and civic matters, especially Guinier's association with the Urban League in the 1960s. The correspondence throughout the series is general in character; more topical letters will be found throughout the collection. The correspondence for 1969 and 1970 consists mostly of congratulatory letters from former labor and business associates, former colleagues at Columbia University, and Harvard faculty and black studies professionals in general. Many incoming letters came from American and overseas graduate and undergraduate students inquiring about admission procedures and scholarship opportunities, and from educators and writers seeking an appointment in the department. Many such letters include dissertation outlines and research proposals. Student groups throughout the country wrote to Guinier seeking his assistance in establishing black studies programs at their schools. He also corresponded with black studies program directors and administrators on what many perceived as a backlash at many colleges and universities in the 1970s. Correspondents in the field included James Turner, Molefi Asante, John Henrik Clarke, Louis Lomax, C. L. R. James, Ronald Walters and Sterling Stuckey.</p> <p>An important part of the correspondence deals with the day to day operation of the department and with Guinier's various points of contention with the University. A January 1971 letter to Dean Dunlop evokes, in characteristic fashion, the broad Faculty Senate mandate which led to the creation of the department, the better to deplore the lack of institutional support in the present. The series also comprises administrative letters and memoranda to the staff of the department. The December 1971 file includes letters from over twenty chairmen of academic centers, departments and divisions within Harvard, in reply to an inquiry by Guinier on their operation and administration and on the matter of student representation on their executive committees. This file also includes letters to and from members of the Visiting Committee to Evaluate the Afro-American Studies Department and the Commission of Inquiry which investigated the unauthorized exclusion of whites from a lecture by Mrs. Shirley Graham DuBois sponsored by the department. Harvard correspondents include deans John Dunlop, Franklin Ford and Henry Rosovsky of the Faculty of Art and Sciences, President Derek Bok, financial officers, deans of other schools and Harvard houses, and Walter Leonard, a special assistant to president Bok for affirmative action and minority affairs.</p> <p>The correspondence between 1976 and 1988 is very sparse and comprises few outgoing letters. Included within this period are letters from Louise Patterson, secretary of the William Patterson Foundation, and correspondence with attachments relating to a gift of books from Guinier's library to the University of Senegal. The latter group includes a letter from President Leopold Sedar Senghor (June 1984). A separate group of letters and research notes by Waring Cuney is located at the end of the series. Occasional correspondents include George Murphy, publisher of the <em render=\"underline\">Afro-American</em> newspaper; Adelaide Hill of Boston University; Irene Diggs, a personal friend and former associate of W. E. B. DuBois; Rosa Guy, an African-American writer, Mabel Smythe, the Jimmy Carter administration's Commissioner on Civil Rights; and John O. Killens, Marguerite Cartwright, John Henrik Clarke, Bernice Reagon, Derrick Bell, Jacob Lawrence and Alvin Poussaint. Guinier also wrote letters of recommendation on behalf of former students and employees, colleagues and friends, and junior black studies instructors. These letters are arranged alphabetically are restricted until 2041.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280412'>Writings and Notes</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Guinier's early writings deal with issues of labor and electoral politics and include an article, \"Careers for Negroes in Civil Service\", published in the March 1940 edition of <em render=\"underline\">Opportunity</em>, the magazine of the National Urban League. The remaining articles in this series were written between 1972 and 1978 and relate to labor and black studies issues. Included are several introductory articles for the Black Studies program at Harvard, \"Black Studies Alive and Well at Harvard\" published in the <em render=\"underline\">Pittsburgh Courier</em>. \"Impact of Unionization on Blacks\", articles on the black experience at Harvard and on the need for a black perspective in history, and his blistering attack, \"Bok's Blacks\" against Harvard's administration and several prominent African- Americans at Harvard. His published and unpublished reviews encompass the work of David Levering Lewis and Nathan Huggins, Boris Bittker's book \"The Case for Black Reparations\", James Earl Jones's 1977 stage performance in the role of Paul Robeson at the Colonial Theater in Boston, and the film \"Kongi's Harvest\". Each file consists of various drafts of the manuscript and some correspondence with publishers. Printed versions of the articles are filed separately in a printed matter file.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280476'>Harvard University</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>The Harvard series forms the bulk of the collection. Divided into 12 subseries, it retains most of Guinier's original arrangement and purpose, though archival processing, mainly the weeding out of duplication, may have somewhat reduced the essentially polemical scheme of the original filing system. Guinier fought a war of documents against Harvard. Using the April 22, 1969 Faculty Senate resolution as his foundation, he cataloged every infraction against this original mandate and challenged the university relentlessly in order to secure full departmental status for the black studies program and the development of the proposed DuBois Institute. Copies of articles, reports, correspondence and documents interspersed throughout the series reveal a veritable war of attrition, with the same battles fought year after year during his entire tenure as chairman.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280768'>Black Studies in the United States</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>This series is divided into three categories: Correspondence, a Subject File, and Black Studies Programs arranged alphabetically under the heading of their schools. The bulk of the correspondence consists of letters of inquiry from administrators, educators and scholars involved in the implementation of similar programs at schools and universities across the country, and letters from graduate and undergraduate students seeking advice or information for their research projects or to supplement offerings at their schools.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280853'>Vertical File</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Named the Vertical File by Ewart Guinier, this printed matter and clipping file was an important complement to the reading list for Guinier's classes, which often took the form of a comparative juxtaposition between past and present. The bulk of this series was arranged alphabetically according to subject headings selected by Guinier. Materials in the last box, however, are arranged by year (1969-1980), and reveal the permanence of certain themes in his curriculum. The entire series consists of newspaper and magazine articles, conference programs, mimeographed letters and reports, newsletters and factsheets, and selected student papers, and represents a valuable source of information on black politics and history from 1969 to 1975.</p> <p>Broad headings such as Africa, art, politics, economics, employment, music, unions and Third World amount to a pot-pourri of materials on various topics. The general file on Africa, for example, includes a signed invitation with attachments from Alioune Diop for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 75), an open letter from Abdias do Nascimento, president of the Negro Experimental Theatre in Brazil to the First World Festival of Negro Arts (1966), background information on Ethiopia and Selassie University in Addis Ababa, three statements by Congressman Charles Diggs, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Africa in 1972, and a special issue of Binding Ties (September 1973) on famine in Africa. The Art folder deals partly with the Black Arts Movement. The section on Politics is divided into local New York, electoral and grassroots politics. The Cold War files, the largest in the series, include extensive notes and comments written by Guinier in reaction to a special Newsweek issue, \"The Negro in America\". The Communications folder deals for the most part with the cancellation of Tony Brown's educational television program \"Black Journal\" by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Community Affairs file documents charges of racial discrimination brought by the Haralsan County Day Care Center, a black Appalachian community concern in Georgia, against the Appalachian Regional Council in the matter of early education of black and poor children. The Economics file includes some writings by the black economist Andrew Brimmer and articles on small black businesses and the issue of black reparations. The Employment folder includes articles on blacks in the railroad industry, unemployment in Harlem and Jim Crow practices in local and federal government in the 1940s and 1950s. The file Prisons and Prisoners consists mostly of printed matter on the 1971 Attica uprising and the Soledad Brothers. The files under Racism include a 124p. typescript \"Character and Consequences of Race Relations in Twentieth Century America\" (author unknown).</p> <p>Finally, the Unions file includes the transcript of a 1974 interview with Cleveland Robinson.</p></div></li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280935'>RESTRICTED FILES</a></div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280940'>Recordings</a></div>\n</li><li><div class='series-title'><a href='/scm/20650#c1280965'>Photographs</a></div>\n<div class='series-description'><p>Portraits of Ewart Guinier and family.</p> <p>Ewart Guinier with CLR James, Herbert Aptheker, Lerone Bennett, with Derek Bok and Ephraim Isaac, and with participants at the Rosslyn Conference.</p> <p>UPW officials, including Abram Flaxer and Thomas Richardson. UPW conventions, organizing conferences, fundraising affairs, meetings and demonstrations.</p> <p>Also portraits of Helen Armstead Johnson, Hugh Mulzac, Robert Justice, Herbert Aptheker, Betty Shabbazz and her daughters (1972), Rosa Guy, A. B. Spellman and Sterling Stuckey.</p></div></li></ul>\n", "type"=>"arrangement"}