Charles Ogletree, longtime legal civil rights scholar, dies at 70
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a law professor and civil rights scholar with a distinguished career at Harvard Law School and whose list of clients ranged from Anita Hill to Tupac Shakur, died Friday after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 70.
A California native who often spoke of his humble roots, Ogletree worked in the farm fields of the Central Valley before establishing himself as a legal scholar at one of the nation’s most prominent law schools where he taught Barack and Michelle Obama.
Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning shared news of Ogletree’s death in a message to the campus community Friday.
“Charles was a tireless advocate for civil rights, equality, human dignity, and social justice,” Manning said in the message that the law school emailed to The Associated Press. “He changed the world in so many ways, and he will be sorely missed in a world that very much needs him.”
Ogletree represented Hill when she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during the future U.S. Supreme Court justice’s Senate confirmation hearings in 1991.
He defended the late rapper Tupac Shakur in criminal and civil cases. He also fought unsuccessfully for reparations for members of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Black community who survived a 1921 white supremacist massacre.
Ogletree was surrounded by his family when he died peacefully at his home in Odenton, Maryland, his family said in a statement.
Ogletree went public with the news that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016. He retired from Harvard Law School in 2020. The Merced County courthouse in California’s agricultural heartland was named after him in February in recognition of his contributions to law, education and civil rights.
Ogletree didn’t attend the ceremony unveiling his name on the courthouse His brother told the crowd that gathered in the town in the San Joaquin Valley that his brother was his hero and that he would have expected him to say what he’d said many times before: “I stand on the shoulders of others.”