Mr. Ogletree, affectionately often known as Tree, rose from an impoverished childhood in California’s Central Valley to turn out to be a celebrated public defender in Washington, a number one authorized theorist at Harvard Regulation College, and an legal professional for such high-profile purchasers as Mafia chief John A. Gotti, rapper Tupac Shakur and Anita Hill when she accused U.S. Supreme Courtroom nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
At Harvard, the place Mr. Ogletree acquired a regulation diploma in 1978 and started educating in 1984, he introduced a extra scientific focus to a regulation college lengthy recognized for its emphasis on authorized idea. He additionally introduced a level of variety to a college that was overwhelmingly White.
Mr. Ogletree mentored college students together with Barack and Michelle Obama, espousing an understanding of the regulation as “an instrument for social and political change” and “a software to empower the dispossessed and disenfranchised.”
To that finish, he organized Harvard’s Felony Justice Institute, during which college students signify poor purchasers within the Boston space. He additionally led a “Saturday college” program geared towards minority college students searching for extra coaching within the intricacies of tort regulation or civil process, and established the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, a middle for public coverage and authorized advocacy named for the civil rights lawyer who taught Thurgood Marshall, the primary Black Supreme Courtroom justice, and Oliver Hill, who helped overturn authorized segregation in Virginia.
“When you point out the identify ‘Ogletree,’ I don’t suppose the phrase ‘weak spot’ comes into anybody’s thoughts,” fellow Harvard Regulation professor Alan Dershowitz advised the Boston Globe in 1995. “Right here’s a man who may very well be something he desires. He may very well be a decide, he may very well be dean, he may very well be a justice on the Supreme Courtroom. He’s a person for all seasons.”
Mr. Ogletree got here to nationwide prominence within the late 1980s as a moderator of “Ethics in America,” a 10-part PBS program during which regulation professors posed hypothetical eventualities to politicians, journalists and different public figures. He later was a authorized commentator, precisely predicting an acquittal within the O.J. Simpson homicide case, and wrote and edited books on capital punishment, life with out parole and police conduct in minority communities.
As a lawyer, his purchasers included Desiree Washington, a Miss Black America contestant who was raped by boxer Mike Tyson. (Tyson was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to 6 years in jail.) Mr. Ogletree additionally represented Shakur in a number of instances earlier than the rapper was fatally shot in 1996, and served on Gotti’s authorized group when the mobster pleaded responsible to racketeering costs in 1999.
However he was most carefully linked to Hill, a lawyer and educational who in 1991 accused Thomas of sexually harassing her after they labored collectively on the Equal Employment Alternative Fee.
Mr. Ogletree was up for tenure when she invited him to affix her authorized group. “He had rather a lot on his plate, and being concerned, on my behalf, in a sensational public listening to could have made some school uneasy,” Hill advised the Harvard Gazette, a college publication, in 2017. “He actually had his job and his profession on the road, however Charles agreed.”
As a senior lawyer on Hill’s authorized group, Mr. Ogletree advised she maintain a information convention asserting the outcomes of a polygraph check, during which she was discovered to have answered honestly whereas recalling that Thomas spoke to her about pornography, intercourse acts and his bodily endowment.
The information convention, and three days of televised congressional hearings, galvanized a nationwide debate over sexual harassment however failed to dam the affirmation of Thomas, who denied the allegations.
Mr. Ogletree’s work typically centered on the intersection of race, class and prison justice. A self-described “Brown child,” he credited a lot of his skilled success to alternatives created within the aftermath of the Supreme Courtroom’s choice in Brown v. Board of Schooling, which declared segregated public faculties unconstitutional, at the same time as he insisted that the courts — and the nation as an entire — had not gone far sufficient in addressing racial discrimination.
His efforts to fight inequality culminated within the Reparations Coordinating Committee, a gaggle of Black legal professionals, intellectuals, activists and students convened after the publication of “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks,” a 2000 bestseller by lawyer Randall Robinson, who estimated unpaid wages to enslaved folks at $1.four trillion. One other estimate, cited in Harper’s journal, put the full at $97 trillion.
Mr. Ogletree, the committee’s co-chair, argued that reparations for slavery had been an ethical necessity, and known as for cash to be positioned right into a fund benefiting “the bottom-stuck,” his time period for Black People who by no means benefited from integration.
Working with legal professionals together with Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., he pursued an array of reparations claims, together with a 2003 lawsuit on behalf of the 150 survivors and practically 200 descendants of the victims of the Tulsa bloodbath.
The killings, generally described as a race riot, had been triggered by the arrest of a Black teenage shoe shiner who had stepped into an elevator with a White elevator operator, who then screamed; in line with one in style account, {the teenager} had stepped on the again of her shoe. A lot of Tulsa’s affluent Black neighborhood was subsequently destroyed, with 40 blocks razed, greater than 10,000 folks left homeless and a few 300 killed.
An Oklahoma state fee advisable reparations for the bloodbath’s victims, however the U.S. Supreme Courtroom declined to listen to the case in 2005, leaving in place a decrease court docket’s ruling that an excessive amount of time had handed for the reason that occasion. Mr. Ogletree was equally unsuccessful in a 2002 lawsuit, filed on behalf of the descendants of enslaved folks, which argued that corporations together with Lehman Brothers, Aetna and R.J. Reynolds had profited from slavery.
Nonetheless, he and Robinson “raised public consciousness in regards to the current results of historic injustices suffered by Blacks, and urged all People to reckon with slavery,” mentioned Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a Harvard Regulation colleague and then-director of the Houston Institute, in a 2019 interview.
Mr. Ogletree remained optimistic that reparations would ultimately come to cross. Within the meantime, he sought a extra quick response to the ache he and his forebears had felt for generations. He had tried to analysis his household historical past, he mentioned, however discovered it tough to hint his lineage via lengthy years of slavery and bondage.
“There are not any grave markers, no beginning information. Only a void that’s palpable,” he advised the Harvard Regulation Bulletin in 2001. “If I might take the step to fill that void, to me that may be vital. There could be no anger. There would simply be a way of closure.”
The oldest of six kids, Charles James Ogletree Jr. was born in Merced, Calif., on Dec. 31, 1952. Fishing journeys along with his grandfather had been a respite from a house life during which his dad and mom, each farmworkers, incessantly fought. They ultimately divorced.
Mr. Ogletree immersed himself in political activism as a scholar at Stanford College, attending Black Panther occasions and enhancing a Black scholar newspaper. He additionally sat in on the trial of scholar and activist Angela Davis, who was finally cleared of costs that she had participated in a 1970 shootout on the courthouse in close by Marin County.
The trial, particularly the intricate protection technique of Davis’s legal professional, Leo Branton Jr., impressed Mr. Ogletree to pursue a authorized profession. He graduated from Stanford in three years, receiving a bachelor’s diploma in 1974, and earned a grasp’s diploma from the college the subsequent yr.
Whereas at Harvard Regulation, he was elected president of the Black American Regulation College students Affiliation (now the Nationwide Black Regulation College students Affiliation). He joined the D.C. Public Defender Service after graduating and resigned in 1985, after being handed over as director.
Mr. Ogletree labored in non-public observe earlier than becoming a member of Harvard full-time in 1989. He additionally served as chairman of the Southern Middle for Human Rights and was board chairman of the College of the District of Columbia.
He married Pamela Barnes, a Stanford classmate who went on to steer Youngsters’s Providers of Roxbury, a Massachusetts nonprofit, in 1975. Along with his spouse, survivors embrace two kids, Charles Ogletree III and Rashida Ogletree, and quite a lot of grandchildren.
In 2004, Mr. Ogletree revealed “All Deliberate Velocity: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Schooling,” which blended parts of historical past and memoir. After a number of paragraphs had been discovered to have been plagiarized from a piece by authorized scholar Jack Balkin, Mr. Ogletree issued an apology, saying that two analysis assistants had by accident inserted the passage into the manuscript with out attribution.
His different books included “The Presumption of Guilt” (2010), written after Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Black filmmaker, scholar and cultural critic primarily based at Harvard, was arrested at his residence when a 911 caller mistook him for a burglar.
The arrest sparked a nationwide debate over race and policing, with President Barack Obama remarking that the police “acted stupidly.” The incident echoed considerations Mr. Ogletree raised greater than a decade earlier, when he advised the Globe that he feared for his kids’s security after they left the home. Even his teenage daughter was thought of “a psychological risk” when she went trick-or-treating, he mentioned.
“I’ve bought to inform them it’s going to be all proper, it’s going to get higher,” he added, acknowledging that he performed the a part of the “everlasting optimist,” even within the face of opposite proof. “If I’m giving up on the system, what likelihood have they got? I’m not going to surrender. … That’s not going to occur.”