I.

I am going to speak about 1968, but first, I want to take you back to the year 1900 for a moment. We tend to think of the past through our own frame of reference, more or less as a sepia version of the present. I remember reading about Harvard’s time capsule, the Chest of 1900, a record of life at the university at the turn of the century, and looking for some testimony in its contents about black life on campus back then.

Remember, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, only ten black men graduated from the college between 1900 and 1904. One reference I found was a note that a white student made about his black classmate, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, “a very bright negro in college,” he wrote.¹ Roscoe was the son of the first black American to serve a full term in the Reconstruction Senate, Blanche K. Bruce, Republican from Mississippi. Bruce came to Harvard from Exeter, won the Pasteur Medal for Debating and Coolidge Debating Prize, and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1902. After extolling his fellow student’s extraordinary intelligence, the writer, Harry Kellogg Durland, noted that Bruce was “singly retiring in private life,” so much so that he “apparently does not see even his friends on the street if they are white men unless they first recognize him.”² Now, we all know why Roscoe Bruce wouldn’t speak to his white friends in public until they first spoke to him. It is clear that even for him, a leader of his class—in fact, the Class Day orator at commencement—visibility, for a black person at the height of the Jim Crow era, was a matter of passively being seen, not proactively being heard. He couldn’t speak in public, even to his white friends, unless he was spoken to first! He could be seen, but not heard. It’s important that we be reminded of these race rituals, as sad as we might find this story, both to insert ourselves more fully into the past and to chart the degree to which things racial at Harvard do change and have changed. And in 1968, black students at Harvard decided that it was long past time not only for their faces—and even more black faces—to been seen, and that their voices be heard, publicly.

In some ways, 1968 seems like yesterday for so many of us, since so much happened fundamentally to reshape our nation and the life choices for those of us in our generation in that year. But in many other ways, 1968 was a very long time ago.

Perspective matters, which makes me wonder: If MLK came back and asked you what had changed in the status and condition of black America in the fifty years since that terrible day in April 1968 when he was so brutally assassinated, what would you say? The rising role of women in general—a female historian the president of Harvard!—and of black women in the economy and leadership positions, more particularly—a black woman tenured professor at HBS [Harvard Business School]!—would have surprised him, I think. But according to our colleague William Julius Wilson, he would find the most radical transformations in the fact that since his death, the size of the black middle class doubled to 24 percent, and the size of the black upper-middle class has quadrupled, rising to 15 percent. I believe that Dr. King would find those statistics nothing short of revolutionary, considering how small the middle and upper-middle classes were when he died. (I’ll return to the other side of those remarkable numbers, the nether side, near the end of my remarks, which also would have astonished Dr. King.)

But … as many of us in this room can vividly remember, precisely when the Black Panthers were talking about revolution in terms of burning the system down, another revolution was brewing, a class restructuring was about to occur, which William Julius Wilson calls “one of the most significant changes in the past several decades … the remarkable gains in income among more affluent blacks,” and we can trace at least part of its roots right back to events that were unfolding on this campus and at this school.³

For I believe that the great insight of the founders of the African American Student Union (AASU) was that the presence and productivity of African Americans at HBS are barometers for the state of the nation as a whole and continue to serve as catalysts for growth and change at a time of promise and uncertainty in the land, both then and now. That, ladies and gentlemen, was an idea as radical as it was prescient. (And about at the same time, by the way, that seminal, visionary figure in American corporate history, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., was one of the first leaders of a civil rights organization to see its importance, too. We’ll return to Vernon a bit later.)

Tracing the arc of history back to the founding of the AASU, we recall that 1968 was another year of promise and uncertainty. On one hand, we were still touched by the glowing victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, along with the birth of the Great Society amidst a sustained postwar economic boom. On the other hand, the stalemate and death toll in Vietnam galvanized student unease and protest, while unrest in inner cities from Newark to Detroit the previous summer awakened the world to the intractable problems of social and economic injustice, as well as the fractured trust between the black community and the law, in the North as well as the South. As the Kerner Commission report on civil disorders attested, released less than two months before Dr. King was killed, a tale of two Americas was unfolding—a “nation … moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”⁴

President Kennedy had told the nation in a bold address back in June 1963, after tangling with Alabama governor George Wallace over desegregation at the state university in Tuscaloosa, that “[o]ne hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”⁵

“[T]he harsh fact of the matter is that in the battle for true equality too many—far too many—are losing ground every day,” Lyndon Johnson warned in his commencement address at Howard University in 1965. In laying out his broad vision for equal opportunity, or what would come to be called affirmative action, LBJ made clear that, despite the passage of civil rights legislation (a triumph he could rightfully claim), too much of black America was still “buried under a blanket of history and circumstance,” going back to slavery, and that it was “not a lasting solution to lift just one corner of that blanket.”⁶

Dr. King characterized this dilemma of history as the “promissory note” that the nation had issued to the formerly enslaved after the Civil War, a promissory note which had, for a century, been marked “insufficient funds.” By 1968, it was well past time to deliver.⁷

II.

Into that breach stepped a handful of black members of the incoming seven-hundred-member HBS class of 1969. Five of them would change history, and it is their actions that ultimately led to the organization that we commemorate today. Arriving on campus in the fall of 1967, they each would have to answer the same question every black incoming student at Harvard had faced since Reconstruction: Would they, in the words of the great W. E. B. Du Bois (college class of 1890, PhD 1895), be “in Harvard, but not of” Harvard?⁸

To be sure, they weren’t the first black students to cross the Charles River to attend the Business School. Since its founding in 1908, close to fifty African Americans had come through HBS. The first, as far as we know, was Wendell Thomas Cunningham, the son of a former slave, who earned his MBA in 1915, the same year that the infamous film The Birth of a Nation hit theaters, erasing in the mind of the broad American public the true legacy of Reconstruction and reinforcing the cruel, distorted color line enacted during the era of Jim Crow. Nearly a dozen black students had followed in a scattered fashion by 1930, including Norris B. Herndon, the second-generation leader of Atlanta’s largest black-owned business (now Atlanta Life Financial Group). A little later, the class of 1933 counted among its graduates the pioneering educational and business leader H. Naylor Fitzhugh, who for years was a stalwart of the Howard University business faculty before becoming the first black executive at Pepsi, where he transformed their special markets business.

Fitzhugh represented a generational bridge to the group that I am calling the HBS Five, for like the Little Rock Nine before them, the five brilliant students of the class of 1969 who founded the AASU turned the late W. E. B. Du Bois’s test on its head.

Whether they became “of” Harvard was beside the point. What they actually achieved was transforming Harvard so it was of them.

Their story, to model on the curriculum here, is a case study that should be read closely by anyone looking to effect change from Main Street to Wall Street.

Let me mention the protagonists in this great drama in the history of our school, one by one.

• Lillian Lincoln Lambert:  Lillian is a native of greater Richmond who, unlike many matriculating today, toiled as a maid and typist before enrolling at Howard, where she took a course with Professor Fitzhugh that changed her life. From there, she knew that she was equipped to aim as high as possible. Why not HBS? In the fall of 1967, Lillian became the first black woman to attend this school. Having started out in the segregated schools of the South, she understandably found the predominantly white and nearly all male Allston campus foreign. But like her classmates, she found strength in this adversity, fought to make HBS more hospitable to those black women and men who followed her, and went on to run her own building services company with some 1,200 employees.
• Clifford E. Darden:  To get to HBS, Clif had to drive all the way from Los Angeles, where he’d already had the experience of being one in a throng of white students at USC. He didn’t stop at a Harvard MBA. He also earned his DBA here en route to an illustrious teaching career at Pepperdine.
• Emmanuel Theodore Lewis Jr.:  Philadelphia’s own, Ted attended Washington University in Saint Louis before a stint in the Peace Corps in South America. Not only has he led a distinguished career at Accenture (Anderson Consulting), he happens to be the father of one of my dearest Harvard colleagues, and a rising star in her field of art and architectural history, Dr. Sarah Lewis.
• George R. Price:  Unfortunately, George R. Price is no longer with us, but while he lived, he made a difference. Also an alumnus of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, George worked at Levi Strauss, where he urged his company’s leadership to take a stand against South African apartheid, before launching his own business, Price & Associates, in Maryland.
• A. Leroy Willis:  Last and anything but least, Roy Willis tested the color line in academia before ever arriving at HBS, when he forced the University of Virginia’s College of Arts and Sciences to open its doors to him when he switched his major to chemistry. Roy also served in the US Army as well as in industry. And with his MBA, he focused on community economic development in nearby Roxbury. Today, he runs his own real estate consultancy on the West Coast.

Ladies and gentlemen, these were the roots that the HBS Five brought with them to campus in 1967—and the futures that sprouted before them after departing with their MBAs. In between, they studied passionately and diligently with a greater sense of mission than merely maximizing their own personal returns. Cognizant of the reality that capitalism, for all of its many blessings, produces unequal outcomes, they saw, in their enrollment, a need, according to the motto of the National Association of Colored Women, to “lift as they climbed.”

They knew from their own lives the truth of something Dr. King had written that same year: “The relatively privileged Negro will never be what he ought to be until the underprivileged Negro is what he ought to be. The salvation of the Negro middle class is ultimately dependent upon the salvation of the Negro masses.”⁹ Which calls to mind the third thing that would have shocked Dr. King about our own times: that ours is a mix of the best of times and the worst of times. Despite the phenomenal growth of the black middle classes since his death, the child poverty rate was 38.2 percent in 2010 and hovers around 34 percent today, 33.9 percent of the prison population is comprised of black men, and “the percentage of black Americans with incomes below $15,000 only declined by six percentage points between 1975 and 2016.”¹⁰ And what about wealth accumulation? In 2016, the median wealth of white households was $171,000, ten times the wealth of black households, a larger gap than in 2007.

And that is one of the reasons why we are here today: as a reminder that we all have work to do, that none of us works for him- or herself alone but for all of us, for the larger black community and for the human community as well.

Reviewing the AASU founders’ case study in innovation, institution building, and leading moral change, I can say that the first key, upon arriving on campus, was to resist the isolation of being one of six black students out of seven hundred in their class. In other words, they quickly networked to one another, as well as to their sixth classmate, Carlson Austin, who, though not a founder of the AASU, was the sixth black member of the class of 1969. And in that camaraderie, they not only found support, they found a common aspiration, rooted in the question: Why only six? Why not more?

That brought them to their second key: taking a risk. If they were going to leverage their education at HBS to effect a greater change in society, they couldn’t just talk about it. They needed to act, even if that meant jeopardizing their standing at the school. The risk they took was approaching the then dean of the school, George Baker, and asking him to address the lack of support and inclusion they were witnesses to on campus. “We couldn’t just sit on the banks of the Charles River,” Clif Darden recalled, “and do nothing at a time when racial oppression and discrimination were still a reality in many parts of the country.”¹¹ For Darden, Lincoln Lambert, Price, Willis, and Lewis, HBS was to be no ivory tower, and instead of hoarding the golden opportunity that had come their way, they wanted to swing the gates open wider.

Their third key was setting a goal. As it stood, they (plus Austin) represented 0.86 percent of their class. What they called for was a 10 percent representation goal—approximating the nation’s African American population as a whole. And when some of the faculty resisted, by raising the red flag of quotas, the HBS Five pressed on with their goals, growing them to include not only increased representation but fellowship funding.

The fourth key was no excuses. When the HBS leadership said they’d welcome more qualified black students if only they could find them, the HBS Five—despite their full plates as MBA students—stepped up to become recruiters! Just as the abolitionist lion Frederick Douglass pushed Abraham Lincoln to allow black men to fight in the Civil War, and then recruited them when he did, these fearless students crisscrossed the country looking for the next MBA class at the nation’s historically black colleges and leading undergraduate schools. While Dr. King and his allies were formulating that spring’s Poor People’s Campaign, the HBS Five were leading their own campaign to grow “the crossover generation.”¹²

Their travels led them to the fifth key in our case study: benchmarking. If you’re going to build a lasting institution, you have to scour around for successful models. And in that first academic year, they found it at UC Berkeley, where the Afro-American Student Association had quickly become a powerful voice on campus, with strong leadership and a cohesive organizational structure. It was that model that the HBS Five would bring to campus here under their first leader, Clif Darden.

From that institutional base, the AASU seized on the sixth key to their success: forging productive alliances, in this case with Dean Baker and supportive faculty members, who backed their recruiting trips and agreed to fund scholarships to make real the promise of an HBS education for those who had the potential but not the finances.

In its infancy, the AASU was essentially in the position of a startup company trying to attract venture capital from their school. That capital was inclusion, and it worked! Just look at the numbers. HBS went from having six black students in the class of 1969 to twenty-seven in the class of 1970 and fifty-eight the year after that. That’s amazing.

Had there suddenly been a bumper crop of potential black business leaders? No!

These students realized that six was essentially a quota; their task—the radical task of affirmative action—was to dismantle a historically racist quota and allow talented, qualified black women and black men to compete! That is the true origin of affirmative action, and we must never allow American society to forget that. The HBS Five were dismantling a quota. And dismantle it they did.

III.

That said, it wasn’t all smooth sailing in that first year.

I was a seventeen-year-old high school student in Piedmont, West Virginia, on April 4, 1968, and I can still recall so painfully what it was like to learn of the news that Dr. King had been murdered in Memphis. It was then—and remains—a break, a rip, a tear in history. That night, and in the ensuing days, all hell broke loose in 110 black communities all across America.

After the riots, all the societal ills Dr. King had been marching to solve remained with us. The difference was he was gone, and as much as his critics (and there were many) denounced him for being out of step with Black Power and needlessly meddling in “the white man’s business” of the Vietnam War, there was no doubt that his death made the air feel thinner, the landscape emptier, the hope of lasting racial peace and integration more elusive.¹³

Yet, as we mourned him, and watched his brave, dignified widow and children teach us how to endure loss, we realized we still had his words. The record of his actions. The animating force of his dream.

That animating force was felt here by the HBS Five. Clif Darden, who traveled to Atlanta for the King funeral, had actually contemplated dropping out, given the avalanche that had just hit black Americans, but then he realized, it was actually a make-or-break moment. Roy Willis felt the same. Dr. King’s murder was a wakeup call to “put our MBAs on the line,” he said. And Ted Lewis said this: “[F]or many African Americans, it was a very positive era in which we were living. Sometimes it was overshadowed by tragedy, but in my mind those tragedies really didn’t define the era. We felt particularly emboldened—that we had nothing to lose.”¹⁴

It’s easy to miss the complexity that Ted articulates in the headlines from 1968, but it was felt—and lived—right here, which brings me to the seventh and final key in our case study of the AASU: when tragedy strikes, don’t retreat. Instead, expand the mission. Be proactive. Go on the offensive. Welcome new blood. Demand more of yourself, each other, and the team.

That is precisely what the AASU did. When the next school year started, the first class hosted a welcome party for the second class. They greeted the school’s first black visiting lecturer, Ulric St. Clair Haynes Jr. (later the US ambassador to Algeria) and advocated for more. They also planned for a Black Power Day, spoke out in support of Harvard hiring more minority workers for its capital projects, and called for a strike when, in 1970, a pair of black students were killed in Jackson, Mississippi. At the same time, they pressed for the creation of relevant elective courses—including one on economic development in inner cities. Looking back, Clif Darden observed, “We were the first student group at HBS formed on some basis other than professional aspirations.”¹⁵

That basis was moral leadership. And it’s a basis that has not only enhanced the black experience at HBS. It has enhanced Harvard as a mission-driven institution, while also helping to cultivate generations of successive business leaders who have made cause and capital the foundations of their careers.

Since the AASU’s founding fifty years ago, some two thousand African American students have taken that journey across the Charles to study at this place. The annual H. Naylor Fitzhugh Conference is a beehive for business and other thought leaders who continue to lift as they climb. And each generation takes up that mantle of reaching beyond one’s own professional aspirations to solve the burning questions of the day, whether economic inequality or environmental sustainability or the persistent disparities we see atop Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

There are too many success stories to mention everyone’s name, but let me list a select few from the 1970s and 1980s:

From Peter Bynoe (1975), the onetime part owner of the Denver Nuggets to star attorney Ted Wells Jr. (1976), a member of the Harvard Corporation. From Benaree “Bennie” Pratt Wiley (1972), founder and CEO of the Partnership, and Ann Fudge (1977), the former chairman and CEO of Young & Rubicam Brands, to Carla Harris (1987), the vice chairman of wealth management and senior client adviser at Morgan Stanley, whom President Barack Obama appointed as chair of his National Women’s Business Council. From Stan O’Neal (1978), who, as Merrill Lynch CEO, became the first African American to lead a major Wall Street firm, to Henry McGee (1979), the former president of HBO and now a member of the faculty here. From Bayo Ogunlesi (1979), chairman and managing partner at Global Infrastructure Partners, and William M. Lewis Jr. (1982), managing director and cochairman of investment banking at Lazard, to Edward Lewis (1983), cofounder and publisher of Essence magazine. From Raymond McGuire (1984), Citigroup’s global head of corporate and investment banking, to Pamela Joyner (1984), founding partner of Avid Partners and chair of the Tate Americans Foundation, Deborah Wright (1984), former president and CEO of Carver Savings Bank, and Desiree Glapion Rogers (1985), former CEO of Johnson Publications.

Ladies and gentlemen, I could go on all afternoon, since the list of distinguished alums of this school goes on and on and on, and speaks to a broader cross-over generation at and beyond HBS that includes the likes of Kenneth Chenault (like Ted Wells, a member of the Harvard Corporation), Richard Parsons, Franklin Raines, Ken Frazier, Ursula Burns, Roger W. Ferguson, John W. Thompson, Linda Johnson Rice, Debra Lee, Rosalind Brewer, John W. Rogers Jr., Oprah Winfrey, Sheila Johnson, Robert F. Smith, and, most certainly, Vernon Jordan, who has done so much to integrate American corporate boards that I have hailed him as “the Rosa Parks of Wall Street.”¹⁶ (We sometimes joke that Vernon has integrated more corporate boardrooms than SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] integrated lunch counters at Woolworths throughout the South!)

Then there are the dozens of African Americans who have served in various roles on the faculty over the years, going back to Harding B. Young, a fellow in 1954–1955, just after the Brown v. Board decision, far too many for me to name them all.

We remember and salute each and every one, especially:

• Andrew Brimmer, who taught here as visiting professor in the 1970s.
• James Cash Jr., the first African American tenured professor at HBS (now emeritus).
• Linda Hill, the first black woman to earn tenure at the school.
• David A. Thomas, who was the first professor here to occupy the H. Naylor Fitzhugh endowed chair at HBS (now he’s the president of Morehouse College); and
• Tsedal Neeley, an associate professor at HBS who, I understand, will be elevated to full professor in July. Congratulations!

My friend Darren Walker, who heads up the Ford Foundation, is fond of quoting Dr. King, who said, “Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”¹⁷ That is the kind of philanthropy these leaders represent, and it goes right back to the ethic Clif Darden mentioned about the founding of the AASU: to reach beyond personal or professional aspirations and to keep ever in mind that while the ranks of the black upper-middle class may have quadrupled since Dr. King’s death, we still have a long way to go.

Two months before his assassination, Dr. King, in a speech he delivered in Atlanta, Georgia, taught us that “[e]verybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”¹⁸ That is what the HBS Five so clearly understood, and that is what this celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the AASU is all about.

IV.

The story of the HBS Five is one more reminder that we are all ultimately connected.

As Dr. Benjamin Mays, “spiritual mentor” to Dr. King as president of Morehouse College from 1940 to 1967, once declaimed, “The destiny of each man is tied up with the destiny of another. We are so interlaced and interwoven that what affects one touches all. We are all bound together in one great humanity.”¹⁹

Proof of his prophetic words is found at the intersections of history and place, from Jamestown to Appomattox, Selma to Montgomery, Charleston to Charlottesville, Memphis to Harvard Business School.

“History is on your side.… Keep struggling with this faith and the tragic midnight of anarchy and mob rule which encompasses your city at this time will be transformed into the glowing daybreak of freedom and justice.”²⁰ Those were the words Dr. King telegrammed to local black leaders in Little Rock as he, like the rest of us, watched the events unfold there.

Today, as another day moves toward night here in these United States, we again find ourselves in a struggle for freedom and justice at home and abroad. At this moment—unimaginable for most of us just a year ago—we know that we, like Dr. King, the Little Rock Nine, and the HBS Five, again have to draw a line in the sand:

We must defend the right of every American to vote.

We must defend the very affirmative action programs that launched many people of color and women of all colors into their positions of authority and power.

We must end the madness of mass incarceration and its devastating impact on the African American community.

We must fight for health care as a right for all Americans, and we must fight to keep the pipeline of educational opportunity open for the next generation, and the next. As Bill Clinton put it in 1997, “[W]e know there are still more doors to be opened, doors to be opened wider, doors we have to keep from being shut.”²¹

We must defend the immigrant and the stranger, the impoverished and the forgotten, and speak sensitively and firmly to the fears of those who see globalization as a threat and who worry that the social and cultural progress of those who look different than they do will wipe away all that they have known.

And regardless of our ideological differences, we must link arms and stand—or kneel—publicly against anti-Semitism, against homophobia, against Islamophobia, against sexism, gender discrimination, and antiblack racism, and, ladies and gentlemen, against white supremacist ideology in all of its hideously ugly, violent forms. This is no time for equivocation or false equivalences. This is a time for truth.

We know that the work, begun here in 1968, is not over. We cannot allow the forces of reaction to turn back the clock on American racial relations, obliterating the heroic efforts of legions of Americans—white and black, Asian and Latino, Jewish and Christian, Muslim and Hindu, gay, straight, and trans—who risked and sometimes tragically and nobly gave their lives to make certain that the arc of the moral universe bent toward justice. Too many hands today are trying to bend that arc back, in another direction. And those of us who love truth and justice, and the principles of democracy upon which this great nation of ours was founded, must stand against those forces, just as the founding members of the HBS Five did right here in this very place.

As I hasten to close, let me express my hope that fifty or one hundred years from now, a future Lillian Lincoln Lambert, Clif Darden, Ted Lewis, George R. Price, and Roy Willis will look back on our time and say that, in this era of fracture, we showed moral leadership, that we seized our freedoms for noble ends, and that when we had the chance, we provided the inspiration for new monuments of hope to fill in a landscape for too long dominated by memorials to a poisoned past.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us seize on this anniversary to remember that we can always serve and, in serving, make a difference, even through the founding of a black student union. And let us never doubt, in these troubled times, that if we hold firm to our moral conscience and to our faith, to our shared history and the possibilities it secured for us, “the tragic midnight” of our time “will be transformed,” as Dr. King said, “into the glowing daybreak of freedom and justice.”

So it was in 1968 when the AASU was founded, so it was when Barack Obama was elected and reelected, and so it can be again.

NOTES

1. Harry Kellogg Durland, “The Chest of 1900,” March 21, 1900, quoted in Ken Gewertz, “Time to Remember: ‘Chest of 1900’ Lets Us See the Way We Were,” Harvard Gazette, January 18, 2001, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2001/01/time-to-remember/.

2. Durland, “The Chest of 1900.”

3. William Julius Wilson, “Don’t Ignore Class When Addressing Racial Gaps in Intergenerational Mobility,” Brookings Institution, April 12, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/04/12/dont-ignore-class-when-addressing-racial-gaps-in-intergenerational-mobility/

4. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, The Kerner Report, with an introduction by Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1.

5. John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on Civil Rights,” June 11, 1963, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/civil-rights-radio-and-television-report-19630611.

6. Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University: “To Fulfill These Rights,” June 4, 1965, TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/commencement-address-at-howard-university-to-fulfill-these-rights/.

7. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/i-have-dream-address-delivered-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom.

8. W. E. B. Du Bois, “A Negro Student at Harvard at the End of the 19th Century,” The Massachusetts Review 1, no. 3 (Spring 1960), 356.

9. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper and Row, 1967; Reprint: Boston, Beacon Press, 2010), 141.

10. Wilson, “Don’t Ignore Class When Addressing Racial Gaps in Intergenerational Mobility.”

11. Quoted in “AASU Founders,” Harvard Business School, https://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/AASU/aasu-founders/.

12. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “American Beyond the Color Line,” January 28, 2004, American RadioWorks, http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/hlgates.html.

13. Martin Luther King, Jr., “My Dream: Peace: God’s Man’s Business,” Chicago Defender, January 1, 1966.

14. Quoted in “AASU Founders,” Harvard Business School.

15. Quoted in “AASU Founders,” Harvard Business School.

16. Sujeet Indap, “Vernon Jordan: ‘It’s Not a Crime to be Close to Wall St.,” Financial Times, August 17, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/429c9540-9fd0-11e8-85da-eeb7a9ce36e4.

17. Martin Luther King, Jr., “On Being a Good Neighbor,” in A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings (New York: Harper and Row, 1963; Reprint: Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 25.

18. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Drum Major Instinct,” in A Gift of Love, 174.

19. Freddie C. Colston, ed., Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Speaks: Representative Speeches of a Great American Orator (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 211.

20. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Dr. King Asks Non-Violence In Little Rock School Crisis,” September 26, 1957, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/dr-king-asks-non-violence-little-rock-school-crisis.

21. William Jefferson Clinton, “Address Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Desegregation of Little Rock Central High School,” September 25, 1997, American Rhetoric, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/wjclintonlittlerocknine40th.htm.