Keeping Alive the Legacy of Legal Trailblazer Charles Ogletree
Q&A with Secretary Rodney Slater
Charles Ogletree Jr. (left) and Secretary Rodney Slater (right)
As a partner of the law firm Squire Patton Bogs, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater, helps clients integrate their interests in the overall vision for the transportation system of the 21st century – a vision he set as Transportation Secretary to promote a safer, more efficient, environmentally sound and sustainable worldwide transportation infrastructure. Among other areas of expertise, he is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Squire Patton Boggs Foundation, which promotes the role of public service and pro bono work in the practice of law and the development of public policy. Additionally, Secretary Slater is a founding partner of the Washington D.C. Nationals Baseball team and Chair Emeritus of the Washington D.C. Nationals Youth Baseball Academy. He also is an NCAA Silver Anniversary Recipient (2002) for football. Secretary Slater is a 2010 Fellow of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative.
The Charles Ogletree Black ALI Association (COBALI) is a dynamic assembly of Black alumni of Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI), a forward-thinking educational program designed to unlock the potential of seasoned leaders in addressing society’s most critical challenges. Charles Ogletree served as one of the initial faculty co-chairs of ALI. In 2021, the Black ALI alumni gathered to pay tribute to Professor Charles Ogletree, acknowledging his profound influence and impact on the course of history, touching the lives of our group members and countless others. With the permission of the Ogletree family, we officially named our group COBALI, in honor of Professor Ogletree. COBALI is rooted in self-organization with the aim to amplify Black voices, discussing shared experiences, influencing discourse of issues within and beyond Harvard, and addressing global and U.S.-specific issues. Committed to shaping conversations and policies, we aim to embody Professor Ogletree's legacy, ensuring Black perspectives are central in shaping a more inclusive future.
Terry Edmonds: Secretary Slater, I want to thank you for doing this interview. Our goal today is to give COBALI a voice in honoring the legacy and the accomplishments of Professor Charles Ogletree.
Kevin Robinson: In addition to Professor Ogletree’s relationship to COBALI and ALI, we’re also hoping to connect your views on his legacy, to the broader discussion about the recent Supreme Court decision virtually eliminating considerations regarding race in college admissions.
Secretary Rodney Slater: Sure, very good.
Edmonds: The first question is, can you tell us how you met Professor Ogletree, and can you briefly share some highlights or some personal anecdotes about your professional and personal experiences with him?
Slater: Well first of all Terry and Kevin, let me commend the two of you for doing this. Clearly many of us had the good fortune of not only knowing, but being mentored, influenced and encouraged by the work of Professor Ogletree. I am just so proud that the two of you are taking the initiative within the COBALI family, those of us who knew Professor Ogletree through ALI, the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard, to bring our voices into the fold. I very much appreciate being part of the effort.
I first met Professor Ogletree at a meeting of the National Bar Association, an association representing black lawyers nationally. Professor Ogletree was representing Anita Hill, and the National Bar Association was engaged and focused on this Supreme Court opportunity. Professor Ogletree was a featured speaker and so that just grabbed my attention. Afterwards, as a young attorney in Arkansas, I started to follow him even more.
One of my most fond memories of him involves being at Metropolitan AME church on a Sunday morning and having a brief interaction with him during the service. I say that to say he was not only a brilliant lawyer, but he was a committed person of faith as well.
And then, probably some of the most exciting experiences with him involved his convening sessions at Martha's Vineyard. He would bring some of the noted voices across the country to come into dialogue about matters of importance to the African American community specifically, but more generally, to issues involving the importance of the law and society as relates to the entirety of America and humanity. These are just some of the rich experiences that I have enjoyed with him over the years.
Robinson: That leads to our next question which is, given his wealth of knowledge, experience, and his portfolio, was there any one or two subject areas or actions that he had taken that in your mind really made him stand out?
Slater: Well, he considered it a pleasure and an honor to represent Professor Hill, and he represented Tupac Shakur, the young rap artist. Also, one of the first things he did after the election of President Obama was to introduce and accompany survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre to the Oval office. Then you've got the wonderful work that he did on the Harvard campus. Professor Ogletree made himself available by bringing students together on a Saturday requiring them to meet and share certain things that would make the remainder of the days of the week more understandable to students, and better prepare them to make Harvard Law a wonderful experience as they prepare for service in the legal arena. Even President Obama has talked about the Saturday School. I am also proud that my daughter, Bridgette, and our son-in-law, Sudheer, got a chance to know him at Harvard Law as well.
There are two other things that come to mind as I reflect on the time that Professor Ogletree and I spent together. Charles Hamilton Houston was someone that Professor Ogletree studied and viewed as a mentor. He knew of Houston’s work to dismantle Jim Crow because he put into action Houston’s legal philosophy and strategy of demonstrating that the separate but equal doctrine was not something that was true in reality. Professor Houston believed that the work of a lawyer is to reconcile the wants and desires of all individuals, each equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Professor Ogletree founded the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute on the Harvard campus and was its executive director. He believed in representing individuals who might have had difficulty finding representation without him. To have the representation of a Harvard educated professor, a Harvard lawyer – someone willing to put his or her credibility on the line for a case that might be viewed as dicey or controversial was extraordinary. I think it was that prism through which our dear Professor Ogletree – “Tree” as we called him – approached the law. For me, as a lawyer and thinking about the connection with Houston and about representing all individuals, each equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that's how I think about Professor Ogletree.
Another thought is a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who talked about “life being made up of action and passion and that we have to be engaged in the action and passion of our times or be judged by future generations never to have lived.” I think that at his core and because of his lived experiences, he never forgot from whence he came, and he never forgot the people that he grew up with, that he loved, and that loved him who needed the kind of expertise that he could bring to bear.
Edmonds: You were a member of ALI’s second cohort. As we all know, Tree was instrumental in starting ALI. Can you tell us a little bit about what you know about that, and how he influenced you to be a part of ALI?
Slater: When I think about ALI, I really have to start with Professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor. I had the opportunity to meet her in 1992. It was the end of a long Presidential campaign involving then Arkansas, Governor Bill Clinton with whom I had the honor of working with in Arkansas, and then like you, Terry, in the Administration. Clinton had convened a group of economic leaders and Rosabeth was one of a handful of women there. After the Clinton Administration, having joined my law firm, Squire Patton Boggs, I reconnected with Rosabeth. That is when she told me about this wonderful effort that she was involved in that involved the entirety of Harvard University. One of the individuals involved that she was excited about was Tree, and that was exciting for me. I then heard from other prominent African Americans involved, Vivian Derryck and Charlie Bolden, who were in that first cohort. They were the ones who shared the substance of the program. I had an opportunity over that period of time to interface with Tree as well. It was during that period that I also got involved in the Martha's Vineyard activities and the events that he would host there as well.
Robinson: Through his force of personality and his compassion, he certainly had a tremendous impact on Harvard, ALI, and COBALI – which leads us to our next question. As one of his colleagues, obviously as an attorney, how impactful was he and his leadership on your career and the careers of other African Americans in the legal profession?
Slater: Much like Tree, I was attracted to Civil Rights law. Clearly, based on how he grew up in Merced, California and how I grew up in Marianna, Arkansas, segregation was obvious in both places. Tree took several avenues in pursuit of making things right. He saw that there was the opportunity to represent those who might be on death row, and so in addition to civil rights, criminal justice was a big area for him as well. But he also seized the opportunity to represent a law professor (Anita Hill), and to represent a young rapper (Tupac Shakur) who found himself in a difficult situation. And he fought for final recognition in the context of the “Tulsa Race Riot” – really a “Tulsa Race Massacre” – and to fight for reparations for the survivors.
When I attended Tree’s funeral in August 2023, I was very impressed that Dean John Manning, dean of Harvard Law School, spoke at the service. His comments about Tree's work as a lawyer but also as a professor at the Law school was something very, very powerful. You had this audience that included so many mentees and people who could talk about the Saturday School, and who could talk about how Tree and Pam (his wife) invited them to their home, whether in Boston, or on Martha's Vineyard. The tribute by Dean Manning was just very significant for a lawyer who had started in one place but ended up clearly in another and who had started thinking about how he might educate himself to have a certain impact and eventually educating others to have an impact. When you think of the challenges that we face today, his work has been most important, monumental in that regard, and I think in years to come in the same vein we talk about Charles Hamilton Houston, and Thurgood Marshall, and even Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., we will be talking about Charles Ogletree.
Edmonds: Thank you. That brings us to our last question, which you've already pretty much answered as far as what do you think his legacy is going to be, but the second part of that question is how can ALI, ALI members, and COBALI members carry on that legacy? What can we do to keep that legacy alive?
Slater: What I love about ALI and COBALI is that it has afforded the lawyers among us to be connected with others among us who go beyond that profession but who've made tremendous contributions in society, the two of you included, along with all of our cohorts and alumni members. I think that what that means is that by harnessing the spirit of ALI and more specifically, the particular role that Tree played in that regard, it affords us an opportunity to not only do as we've done to name ourselves COBALI, after Tree, and connecting it with ALI but also in doing so, to embrace the spirit that he represented and collectively and individually seek to in our own way reconcile the wants and desires, of all individuals equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Or, in the words of Holmes again, “life, being action and passion to be engaged in the action and passion of our times.”
So, we can take up the mantle and in doing so we do honor to ourselves as we do honor to him. I have one specific idea: We can bring back the annual gathering on Martha's Vineyard in Tree’s name where we assemble these wonderful thinkers. We could do it under the ALI banner and we'd have not only the leadership of COBALI, but we'd have the support of the law school and the business school. We need it to help us think about the recent Supreme Court decision and deal with affirmative action. I was talking to Sherrilyn Ifill at the Executive Leadership Council’s Black Corporate Directors Conference, and she suggested that we use this as a new opportunity. We have used cases as tools based on how they were resolved over time. From Brown v. Board of Education to Bakke then so on. Sherrilyn’s suggestion was to look at the implications of the case from the broadest and most positive perspective. For example, take the fig leaf offered by the Chief Justice, who noted that an applicant can still talk about race and how it might have affected them in their personal development, but make it something that really represents more than a fig leaf? I think Tree would have agreed and asked, “Where is the opportunity here? How do we build and set up the next case?” I think we can keep the spirit of his life alive, much as he did with Charles Hamilton Houston, through COBALI and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute.
Robinson: Yes, not just an alignment, but an intersection using Harvard’s convening authority and bringing all of that history forward.
Edmonds: This concludes the questions that we had to ask you. If there's anything else you want to add, please feel free. If not, we can conclude this session.
Slater: Well, I think we covered it well. I appreciated the questions and having a little time to think about them and enjoyed it.
Edmonds: Thank you for your time.
Robinson: Thank you.
“We must not let ourselves be deterred from achieving what so many of our forefathers achieved, in the face of even more formidable challenges. If Africans could survive the innumerable horrors of slavery, and if freed slaves could survive the cruelty and repugnance of the Jim Crow system, we as a nation can, must, and will survive the current manifestations of Brown’s failures.”
– Charles Ogletree Jr. from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
About the Authors:
Kevin Robinson serves as co-lead and senior editor for the Race and Gender Equity Domain under the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative Social Impact Review. He has substantial private sector and public sector legal, governance and strategic expertise and, among other roles, serves as a board member on several community and national non-profit organizations. Kevin is a 2022 Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow.
Terry Edmonds is a 2021 Harvard ALI Fellow and the first African American chief speechwriter for an American president – Bill Clinton.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.