Charles Ogletree, legal scholar who championed reparations, dies at 70

The longtime Harvard Law professor also represented Anita Hill, rapper Tupac Shakur and survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard Law professor who championed civil rights in the classroom as well as the courtroom, notably through his resolute but unsuccessful campaigns to obtain reparations for the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and the descendants of enslaved people, died Aug. 4 at his home in Odenton, Md. He was 70.

The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said Rachel K. Reed, a Harvard Law School spokeswoman. Mr. Ogletree announced in 2016 that he had been diagnosed with the disease.

Mr. Ogletree, affectionately known as Tree, rose from an impoverished childhood in California’s Central Valley to become a celebrated public defender in Washington, a leading legal theorist at Harvard Law School, and an attorney for such high-profile clients as Mafia leader John Gotti, rapper Tupac Shakur and Anita Hill when she accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.

At Harvard, where Mr. Ogletree received a law degree in 1978 and began teaching in 1984, he brought a more clinical focus to a law school long known for its emphasis on legal theory. He also brought a degree of diversity to a faculty that was overwhelmingly White.

Mr. Ogletree mentored students including Barack and Michelle Obama, espousing an understanding of the law as “an instrument for social and political change” and “a tool to empower the dispossessed and disenfranchised.”

To that end, he organized Harvard’s Criminal Justice Institute, in which students represent poor clients in the Boston area. He also led a “Saturday school” program geared toward minority students, with a focus on issues of justice and equality, and established the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice, a center for public policy and legal advocacy named for the civil rights lawyer who taught Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice, and Oliver Hill, who helped overturn legal segregation in Virginia.

“If you mention the name ‘Ogletree,’ I don’t think the word ‘weakness’ comes into anyone’s mind,” fellow Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz told the Boston Globe in 1995. “Here’s a guy who could be anything he wants. He could be a judge, he could be dean, he could be a justice on the Supreme Court. He’s a man for all seasons.”

Mr. Ogletree came to national prominence in the late 1980s as a moderator of “Ethics in America,” a 10-part PBS program in which law professors posed hypothetical scenarios to politicians, journalists and other public figures. He later was a legal commentator, accurately predicting an acquittal in the O.J. Simpson murder case, and wrote and edited books on capital punishment, life without parole and police conduct in minority communities.

As a lawyer, his clients included Desiree Washington, a Miss Black America contestant who was raped by boxer Mike Tyson. (Tyson was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to six years in prison.) Mr. Ogletree also represented Shakur in several cases before the rapper was fatally shot in 1996, and served on Gotti’s legal team when the mobster pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in 1999.

But he was most closely linked to Hill, a lawyer and academic who in 1991 accused Thomas of sexually harassing her when they worked together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Mr. Ogletree was up for tenure when she invited him to join her legal team. “He had a lot on his plate, and being involved, on my behalf, in a sensational public hearing may have made some faculty uneasy,” Hill told the Harvard Gazette, a university publication, in 2017. “He really had his job and his career on the line, but Charles agreed.”

As a senior lawyer on Hill’s legal team, Mr. Ogletree suggested she hold a news conference announcing the results of a polygraph test, in which she was found to have answered truthfully while recalling that Thomas spoke to her about pornography, sex acts and his physical endowment.

The news conference, and three days of televised congressional hearings, galvanized a national debate over sexual harassment but failed to block the confirmation of Thomas, who denied the allegations.

Mr. Ogletree’s work often centered on the intersection of race, class and criminal justice. A self-described “Brown baby,” he credited much of his professional success to opportunities created in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, even as he insisted that the courts — and the country as a whole — had not gone far enough in addressing racial discrimination.

His efforts to combat inequality culminated in the Reparations Coordinating Committee, a group of Black lawyers, intellectuals, activists and scholars 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 people at $1.4 trillion. Another estimate, cited in Harper’s magazine, put the total at $97 trillion.

Mr. Ogletree, the committee’s co-chair, argued that reparations for slavery were a moral necessity, and called for money to be placed into a fund benefiting “the bottom-stuck,” his term for Black Americans who never benefited from integration.

Working with lawyers including Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., he pursued an array of reparations claims, including a 2003 lawsuit on behalf of the 150 survivors and nearly 200 descendants of the victims of the Tulsa massacre.