Race Sparked HLS Tension

A battle brewed between the Harvard Law School administration and leaders of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) in the spring and summer of 1982. The two sides had debated their convictions at numerous meetings, and by the close of the year, the lines were drawn.

Student leaders said that more needed to be done to stop the rapid disappearance of minority voices on the law faculty, while Dean James Vorenberg ’48 insisted that it was proving difficult to find qualified minority scholars who should be granted tenure.

For years, black students at HLS had celebrated small victories: in 1971, the first black law professor, Derrick A. Bell, Jr., earned a tenured position on the faculty, and a second black professor won tenure later that decade.

The progress made during that time was long overdue—after all, the school had been minting black lawyers since 1869. By 1982, however, the situation had begun to deteriorate from the late 1970s.

Bell had left Cambridge in 1980 to become the dean of the University of Oregon Law School, and the BLSA wanted Vorenberg to find a tenured black professor to teach the popular race theory course, “Constitutional Law and Minority Issues,” that Bell had taught.

This time around, the BLSA’s the victory would be small—the Law School hired two visiting professors, one black and one white, neither of whom would be considered for a full-time position—and would come at a cost too high to warrant celebration.

IN THE PUBLIC EYE

Even before the new school year began, a letter arrived on Vorenberg’s desk from the BLSA—an “articulation of our frustrations,” said Donald Christopher Tyler, who was a member of the executive committee of the BLSA.

In the letter, the BLSA threatened to lead a boycott of the new course in order to get the administration’s attention. In response, Vorenberg penned a missive to the school’s returning students and enclosed the BLSA letter as well.

The move opened a debate that had until that point been kept behind closed doors. Vorenberg held fast to Harvard’s longstanding position that it could not find qualified tenure-track faculty members because the pool of such scholars was limited.

The letter to Vorenberg had been authored by a 38-year-old political activist named Muhammad I. Kenyatta, then beginning his third-year at the Law School.

Kenyatta accurately expressed the group’s intent to protest Harvard’s response to the current drought in faculty diversity in his letter, but extended his critique to the professors who would be teaching the course, Julius LeVonne Chambers and Jack Greenberg. It was this latter part that would garner the group widespread negative attention.

The letter claimed that Greenberg, a white civil rights lawyer, was objectionable because of his “apparent hostility toward historically predominantly Black educational institutions, his adamant refusal to relinquish directorship of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to a Black attorney, and his opposition to Black student associations on predominantly white campuses.”

Not long after, the conflict was quickly reduced by the media to a simple dichotomy: the black students wanted more diversity on the faculty, and a white professor teaching simply did not fit that bill.

Tyler said that no one in BLSA saw Kenyatta’s letter before it was sent.

“I remember asking him to let me review the letter before he sent it out...because he tended to be a little more assertive about things than I was,” he said. “He said he would, but he didn’t.”

The story soon reached the national press, but attention was focused on the letter and not the lack of diversity on the law faculty. Editorial writers at The Washington Post and The New York Times condemned the BLSA’s letter as “banal ethnocentrism” and a “disservice” to the civil rights cause.

EYES ON THE PRIZE

Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., a prominent civil rights scholar at the Law School who was a student there in the late 1970s, said that Harvard had begun to show “much progress” towards diversity during that period.

The Law School gave tenure to two black professors in quick succession, a move that mirrored the upsurge in black students enrolled at the University.

At the cusp of the next decade, however, inertia began to set in.

Bell, who had been the trailblazer for black faculty at the Law School, was still on the West Coast, and when C. Clyde Ferguson died in 1983, there were no tenured black professors left on the law faculty.

That period saw the rise of Kenyatta, who entered the Law School in 1980. An unusual student and tireless activist by most accounts, Kenyatta took the helm of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) at the end of his second year and injected a social and political bent into the 15-year-old organization.

Kenyatta quickly emerged among his fellow students as both famous and infamous.

In the 1960s he was heavily involved in the civil rights movement in Mississippi, where he had attended Tugaloo College, a historically-black institution. (It was later revealed that he had been investigated and threatened by the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO, which was charged with disrupting and discrediting the activity of individuals and groups that it deemed dangerously radical.)

Unlike his fellow classmates, Kenyatta, who died in 1992, was a much older and experienced student who would not shy away from the limelight.

“Muhammad often told us that he had been around the block many times before,” said Kimberle W. Crenshaw, then a member of the BLSA and now a law professor at University of California at Los Angeles.

Kenyatta’s long crusade for racial justice would continue at Harvard Law School, where he sought to take on racial discrimination from within the Ivory Tower itself.

Tyler remembers returning to an uneasy campus in the fall as a second-year law student. He says that his white classmates were at first “hostile” towards their efforts, and other black students were taken aback by the firestorm sparked by Vorenberg’s summer letter and its coverage in the national media.

At one of the BLSA’s first meetings of the year, “there were African American students who had never been to a BLSA meeting who showed up asking, ‘What’s going on because there were people at my workplace calling me a racist,’” Tyler said.

The group, with no real alternative, ratified the position that had been laid out in Kenyatta’s letter, and Tyler went to work writing editorials in defense of their position.

The first, sent to The New York Times and The Crimson, denied allegations that the group opposed Greenberg because he was white.

“The fact that one of these visitors, Jack Greenberg, is white is simply not the animus behind our actions,” Tyler said in a letter to the editor. “If there is any racism at Harvard, it is on the part of the Law School administration whose dean expressed a preference for hiring ‘an excellent white teacher’ over a ‘mediocre Black one.’”

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

Both Tyler and Crenshaw said that Vorenberg (who died in 2000) and the protesting students shared a desire to work toward justice and diversity, but the two sides remained engaged in a pitched battle.

The tiff between Vorenberg and Kenyatta seemed in part a clash between two strong personalities.

“Muhammad was an older organizer and I think he and Vorenberg knew each other long before any of us knew either of them,” Crenshaw said. “Whether or not this exchange was a continuation of debates that they had before is difficult to know.”

For Kenyatta, upholding affirmative action at a liberal institution was of utmost importance.

In an interview with The Crimson in 1982, Kenyatta said, “We have to fight to broaden it at the very time institutional America is trying to kill it.”

Vorenberg, who had worked for civil rights icons like Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ’48, met with black student leaders numerous times to discuss how diversity could proceed in Bell’s absence. but in this letter, he asserted that while he shared the BLSA’s “goals of racial and social justice,” there were clear differences of opinion on how these goals were to be achieved.

The students, frustrated with the administration, turned their energy toward direct action under the aegis of the Third World Coalition, an umbrella organization which included groups such as the BLSA and the Arab Students Association.

“The [aim] was to take control of our education and build the kind of learning environment that we wanted the school to provide us,” said Crenshaw, the BLSA’s representative to the Third World Coalition.

The students designed an alternative course in the mold of Bell’s former full semester course on constitutional law and minority issues.

They invited minority scholars—including Ogletree, who had graduated from the Law School in 1978—to give lectures based on Bell’s book. The purpose was to demonstrate to the Law School administration that there were sufficient “qualified” minority scholars to choose from.

In the years that followed, Ogletree said, the administration did seem to take heed to the student’s concerns.

“It was clear to me that people were paying attention and trying to make some serious efforts to continue the diversity,” he said.

In fact, the students’ efforts may have paid some dividends: Randall L. Kennedy, a Yale Law School graduate who had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, won a tenure-track position in 1984.

—Staff writer Abby D. Phillip can be reached at adphill@fas.harvard.edu.