ANNUAL DISTINGUISHED LECTURE FEATURING KENNETH W. MACK: “E. Frederic Morrow and the Historical Time of the Civil Rights Movement”

In this Lecture, Professor Mack will tell the story of lawyer E. Frederick Morrow, who was the first African American to work in the White House in a professional capacity. His official title—Assistant Administrator for Special Projects—does not reveal that he “became the person who both Black Americans and white federal officials expected to explain race and civil rights to a President who was reticent about enforcing civil rights law in the South, and to explain the Eisenhower’s views to an increasingly skeptical Black public.  Morrow’s tenure would encompass many of legal and political milestones of the postwar era: not only the debate over Brown v. Board of Education and Emmet Till’s murder, but also the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a national leader, the birth of the sit-in movement, and the Presidential election of 1960. Nevertheless, he would leave the White House in January 1961 with his reputation, and his self-respect, in tatters. He penned a bitter memoir/diary of his time in the government, titled A Black Man in the White House. More memoirs would follow, each tinged with anger, and each an attempt at self-justification, but to no avail. Morrow quickly slipped into obscurity, largely forgotten by historians and the public alike, just as the civil rights movement was etching itself into law, American public consciousness and transnational collective memory.”

Professor Mack’s Lecture will provide a fascinating window into Morrow’s professional life and the early tumultuous years of the Civil Rights Movement of the Twentieth Century.

Kenneth W. Mack is the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also the co-faculty leader of the Harvard Law School Program on Law and History. His 2012 book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Harvard University Press), was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a National Book Festival Selection, was awarded honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst Award by the Law and Society Association, and was a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Book Award. He is also the co-editor of The New Black: What Has Changed – And What Has Not – With Race in America (New Press, 2013), and the forthcoming In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries (Oxford University Press). His work has been published in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Journal of American History, Law and History Review and other scholarly journals. In 2016-17, he was a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. In 2007, he was named a Fletcher Fellow by the Fletcher Foundation. He has served as the co-director of the Workshops on “The History of Capitalism in the Americas” (2015-16) and “The Long Civil Rights Movement” (2008-09) at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.

He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Georgetown Universities, and the University of Hawai’i, and has served as Senior Visiting Scholar, Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge University. In 2020, he received the Harvard Law School Student Government Teaching and Advising Award.  In 2016, President Obama appointed him to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. He is also a member of the American Law Institute. He began his professional career as an electrical engineer at Bell Laboratories before turning to law, and history. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he clerked for the Honorable Robert L. Carter, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and practiced law in the Washington, D.C. office of the firm, Covington & Burling.

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This lecture will be presented in person and recorded for later distribution.

Light lunch will be available in Barristers starting at 12:15pm.