Charles J. Ogletree Jr. brought the work of a public defender into legal education. At Harvard, he founded the Criminal Justice Institute, which trained student lawyers to represent Boston-area defendants who could not afford one. He also created Saturday School, a forum that supported Black students and brought leading figures in law and other fields to campus to discuss race, justice and equity with them.
Ogletree was born on December 31, 1952, and grew up in Merced, California, where he found encouragement from teachers and a public librarian. In an oral-history interview, he recalled how reading opened up possibilities beyond his hometown. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in political science at Stanford and his law degree at Harvard in 1978, then spent eight years with the District of Columbia Public Defender Service, rising to deputy director.
Harvard appointed him a lecturer in 1984, a professor in 1993 and the Jesse Climenko Professor in 1998. His students included Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, and his mentorship of students was known across the university. He led the law school's Trial Advocacy Workshop for many years.
In 2001, he assembled the Reparations Coordinating Committee, a legal team that represented survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob destroyed a prosperous Black business district and killed hundreds of residents. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed, but Ogletree kept working to see that the survivors' names and stories were recorded. He also represented clients in the public eye, including Anita Hill and Tupac Shakur.
In 2005, he launched the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, named for the lawyer whose litigation campaign led to Brown v. Board of Education, and served as its faculty director. He retired in 2020 after an Alzheimer's diagnosis and spent his last years raising awareness of the disease, especially among people of color. Harvard later established an endowed professorship bearing his name, and a courthouse in his hometown of Merced was named for him. He died at his Maryland home on August 4, 2023.
