Harvard Law School celebrates a rich tradition of black history

New Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2001 by Brown, C Stone

Two years before Royall's death in 1781, he added a codicil to his will leaving 200 acres of land (worth $2.5 million today) for the "endowing of a Professor of Laws at said college, or a Professor of Physics and Anatomy." School administrators sold the land to create a trust to fund Harvard's first chair in law, traditionally occupied by the dean. The Royall family's coat-of-arms was adopted as the Harvard Law School's crest. It shows three stacked wheat sheaves and incorporates the motto, "From the Old Fields Must Spring the New Corn." It is a motto that reveals an entire institution's history in just a few simple words and images. Those "old fields" were located in Antigua, and the "new corn" would symbolically become, apparently not by design, the first African American students to graduate from Harvard Law School.

Only predominantly black Howard University Law School has produced more black lawyers than Harvard Law School. More than two-thirds of the 1,600-plus black lawyers who graduated from Harvard Law School completed their studies between the 1970s and 1990s. Many of those graduates today are distinguished by the names they have made for themselves and the institutions they represent. Harvard law graduates have not limited themselves to careers in law. They can be found influencing the fields of business, finance, politics and even literature.

Among Harvard Law's distinguished black alumni are Pulitzer Prize winner James Alan McPherson ('68); American Express CEO designate Kenneth I. Chenault ('76); Congressman William J. Jefferson ('72); BET Holdings President and COO Debra L. Lee ('80); Fannie Mae CEO and former Office of Management and Budget Director Franklin D. Raines ('76); and TransAfrica President Randall M. Robinson ('70).

"As leaders of our generation, we-both alumni and students-are accountable to those who have come before us to continue the legacy of Harvard Law School," Chenault said in his keynote remarks. Indeed, the legacy stretches back to 1869, when George Lewis Ruffin became the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School.

To put Ruffin's accomplishment in perspective, he graduated only four years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and 79 years before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. As one might expect, Ruffin faced tremendous challenges not only from his studies, but also from the racism of his classmates. At the first meeting of the student assembly, a group of students offered a resolution that "every member of the School is by right a member of the assembly, except for colored students." In a lively debate, Ruffin matched wits with the group, prompting them to rescind the resolution. Ruffin would graduate and become the first black on the Boston City Council, and the first black elected to the Massachusetts Legislature. He finished his career as a municipal judge in Charlestown.

Harvard's second black graduate, Archibald Grimke, enrolled in 1872. Known as a radical, Grimke was editor of the Hub, a popular Republican black newspaper. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland named Grimke consul to Santa Domingo. Upon his return to the United States in 1898, Grimke became closely allied with W.E.B. Du Bois and later became vice president of the NAACP.