Charles J. Ogletree (1952–2023)

You could call All Deliberate Speed a history book as it is filled with didactic chapters and faculty could use it as a textbook, but I would argue it is more of a beautifully written memoir. Ogletree shares his personal reflections on the civil rights decision of Brown v. Board of Education, the conundrum of legalized racial inequality, and how the words "all deliberate speed" allowed the end of segregation to become a reality at a snail's pace. Rest assured, this isn't an autobiography. Ogletree doesn't delve too deep into his personal life with the exception of how it relates to the topic at hand and his part in it. Ogletree writes, not as one who did his homework on a singular subject, as one standing outside the topic at hand, but rather as one who actually lived the history and had a tangible part of the action. "Present at the creation," if you will. Ogletree's narration is as much from fact as it is from memory.… (mer)

Ogletree combines memoir with legal commentary, since he lived or was affected by civil rights milestones: segregated elementary school (Merced, CA) followed by newly-integrated high school; founding of a black student group at Stanford; fundraising for Angela Davis's defense; Shockley on the faculty; protesting Daniel Patrick Moynihan as commencement speaker; hitting Harvard Law School as Boston blew up over busing and volunteering as a legal observer; public defense in DC; head of Anita Hill's legal team; counsel for African Americans in Tulsa seeking reparations for the destruction of the Greenwood District and murder of up to 300 African Americans in a 1921 riot.

I was disappointed to learn shortly after reading this that Ogletree had had to apologize for plagiarism or what appeared to be plagiarism. (He said he used his RA's notes on someone else's work and the notes were really copied passages. Maybe it's not plagiarism, but why would he use his RA's draft without at least editing it to make it his own?)… (mer)