35 Facts About Ewart Guinier

Ewart Gladstone Guinier was a Jamaican-American educator, lawyer, and labor leader.

Ewart Guinier was the founding chairman of Harvard University's Afro-American Studies department, now known as the Department of African and African-American Studies.

Ewart Guinier was born to Howard and Marie-Louise Beresford Guinier on May 17,1910, in the Panama Canal Zone.

Ewart Guinier's parents were Jamaican immigrants living under segregation in the Canal Zone; his father worked as a lawyer and real estate agent, and his mother was a bookkeeper.

Ewart Guinier was one of only a few Black students at the university at the time, and he faced pervasive discrimination, including exclusion from the dormitory system and being ruled ineligible for financial aid.

Ewart Guinier experienced outright social ostracism from white classmates, but was able to make friends with Black upper-class men, including Robert Weaver and Frank Snowden.

Ewart Guinier became a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity in 1930.

Ewart Guinier moved to New York City to finish his degree tuition-free at City College, taking night classes while working a day job as a freight elevator operator at the New York Times building.

In 1956, already midway through a career in labor organizing and politics, Ewart Guinier returned to graduate study and completed a law degree from New York University in 1959.

In 1935, Ewart Guinier began working as head of the Men's Service Rating Bureau, part of the New York City Department of Welfare.

Ewart Guinier went on to a post as Chief of the Civil Service Commission.

Ewart Guinier would become the first chairman of the Rating Bureau local of the State, County, and Municipal Employees of American.

Ewart Guinier served as chairman of the SCMU for the New York State region.

Ewart Guinier served as a regional director for the UPW, then as secretary treasurer for its New York district.

In 1949 Ewart Guinier ran for Manhattan Borough President on the American Labor Party ticket, the first Black candidate to be nominated for that office by any party.

Ewart Guinier promoted policy ideas that would support fair employment practices and root out housing discrimination.

Ewart Guinier received 38 percent of the votes cast in that race, and lost to the Democratic Party candidate, Robert Wagner.

Ewart Guinier continued to be active in labor and community organizing both nationally and locally.

Ewart Guinier helped to found the Harlem Affairs Committee in 1953, and the Jamaica Coordinating Council in 1962.

Ewart Guinier was involved in Communist organizations, including the Harlem Trade Union Council, which he co-founded with Ferdinand Smith, and the National Negro Labor Council, where he was a founding member and a vice president.

Ewart Guinier was a member of the National Urban League, and served as chairman of the Queens Urban League from 1962 to 1968.

In 1968, Ewart Guinier left a post as the executive director of the Brownsville Community Corporation to become an associate director at the Urban Center at Columbia University, where he focused on community programming.

Not long after taking this role at Columbia, Ewart Guinier was hired away by Harvard University.

Ewart Guinier started work there as a full professor in 1969, the year the Afro-American Studies department was founded in response to student protestors' demands for better academic representation.

Ewart Guinier was appointed as the department's first chairman, a position he held until 1976.

Ewart Guinier was involved with Black affinity groups at Harvard, including the Harvard-Radcliffe Association of African and African American Students, the Harvard-Radcliffe African American Cultural Center, the Pan-African Liberation Committee and the Student Organization for Black Unity.

Ewart Guinier corresponded with students from all over the United States who wrote to him seeking advice and information to help them start Black Studies departments at their own institutions.

Ewart Guinier spoke out against institutional racism at Harvard, and advocated for the inclusion of Black perspectives in the teaching and writing of American history.

Kilson argued that the study of Black experience and perspectives could be folded into existing departments; Ewart Guinier answered that that would be impossible at a university where major departments, such as English and Economics, lacked Black faculty members entirely.

Ewart Guinier retired from Harvard in 1980 and retained the title of Professor Emeritus.

Ewart Guinier became the national chairman of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, before fully retiring in 1985.

Ewart Guinier remarried in 1945, to Eugenia "Genii" Paprin, a European Jewish teacher.

Lani Ewart Guinier became a civil rights lawyer, and joined the Harvard Law School as a tenured faculty member in 1998.

Ewart Guinier died on February 4,1990, of Alzheimer's disease, at the Veterans' Hospital of Bedford, Massachusetts.

Ewart Guinier's papers are collected in the Schomburg Center archives at the New York Public Library.