Welcome back to the deep dive. You know, we often
talk about people who have second acts in their
life. Right. Like maybe a lawyer who becomes
a baker or a tech CEO who goes into philanthropy.
But today we are jumping into our source material
on a figure who He didn't just have a second
act. He had three or four distinct lives that
were so different, they almost feel like they
belonged to totally different people. It really
is a dizzying biography to look at. If you just
looked at his resume in chunks, you would absolutely
assume it was three different men. Exactly. We
are talking about Ewert Kinier. And for a lot
of you listening, that last name, Guinier, probably
rings a bell because of his daughter. Lani Guinier
was a huge figure in legal scholarship. Yes,
she was. But her father. His story is really
the prequel that explains everything. It really
is. And it's a story that spans the entire 20th
century struggle for racial justice. But it's
not a straight line. It is a jagged, messy, fascinating
arc. To give everyone sort of the quick version
before we really dive into the details of the
biographical records and historical accounts
here, our mission today is exploring how one
man's life connects the dots between Caribbean
immigration, the U .S. labor movement, and the
fight for black studies in the Ivy League. Which
sounds like a lot to pack into one life. It is.
We are talking about a man born in the Panama
Canal Zone. who immigrated to Boston, got into
Harvard, was forced to drop out, became a freight
elevator operator, rose up to be a massive labor
leader in New York, got purged during the Red
Scare, and then... And then in a twist that you
really couldn't write in a movie because it would
just seem too fake. Right. He returned to Harvard
40 years later to become the first chairman of
their Afro -American Studies department. It is
the ultimate irony. The institution that rejected
him basically had to hire him to fix their problems.
Yeah, but I think what we need to explore today
isn't just that comeback narrative. It's how
all those pieces actually fit together. You literally
cannot understand the way black studies exist
in the Ivy League today. without understanding
the trade union battles of the 1940s. So let's
start at the very beginning. The records show
he was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1910.
Now I know my geography, but I feel like the
Canal Zone in 1910 is a very specific type of
place. Oh, it was essentially a colony. It wasn't
just Panama. It was a strip of land controlled
entirely by the United States. And because it
was run by the U .S. in 1910, they imported the
U .S. social structure. Meaning Jim Crow segregation.
Precisely. They exported segregation right down
to the tropics. They had a gold role for white
American employees, so they were paid in gold,
had better housing, better schools, and they
had a silver role for the Caribbean workers.
And his parents were Jamaican immigrants, right?
Exactly. So they were on that silver roll. They
were paid in silver, lived in substandard housing,
and were strictly segregated. So Ewer Guignere
is born into American segregation without actually
being in America yet. That completely sets the
stage for everything. He knows the system before
he even gets on the boat. But his family eventually
leaves. Yes, but it's born out of tragedy. His
father, who was actually quite educated, he was
a lawyer and a real estate agent, died when Ewert
was only nine years old. That was in 1919. Wow.
Yeah. So his mother, struggling to make ends
meet, moves to Boston to find work. Ewert joins
her there a few years later in 1925. He's 15.
He's in a new country. And the climate shock
alone, going from Panama to Boston, must have
been brutal. Oh, absolutely. But the academic
shock didn't seem to faze him at all. He goes
to Boston English High School and just crushes
it. And in 1929, he gets accepted into Harvard
College. Which is a massive achievement. We really
have to contextualize this for you. In 1929,
the number of black students at Harvard could
probably be counted on one hand. It was an incredibly
isolating environment. And this is where I ran
into a detail in the historical accounts that
really stopped me in my tracks. It's called the
Phantom Letter. I mean, I've heard of ghosting,
but this is next level bureaucratic gaslighting.
Can you break down exactly what happened here?
It is so insidious. So Guigné is a freshman,
he's poor, he needs financial aid, and he really
needs a place to live. So he applies for a room
in the dormitories, just like every other incoming
freshman. But then he receives a letter from
the administration. and the letter very politely
informs him that his request to live off campus
has been approved. But he never asked to live
off campus. No, he never made that request. So
the university just completely fabricated it.
Exactly. It was a way to exclude him from the
dorms without having a written policy that explicitly
said, no black students allowed. If they rejected
him outright, it looks like discrimination. But
if they just grant his request to live elsewhere,
Well, they're just being helpful administrators.
That is maddening. It's so polite and yet so
incredibly destructive. It worked, too. He was
physically barred from the social life of the
college. And on top of that, he was also ruled
ineligible for financial aid. Largely because
of his race, though, they found other administrative
excuses. So he was isolated, broke, and freezing
in Boston. And then, of course, the Great Depression
hits right then in 1929. The final nail in the
coffin. Without financial aid, he just couldn't
survive. He finished his sophomore year, but
he couldn't pay the tuition anymore. He had to
drop out. I just can't imagine the psychological
toll of that. You work your whole life to get
into the best school, you get there, they treat
you like a ghost, and then you have to leave
because you're broke. I feel like most people
would be totally crushed. Disappointed, certainly.
But this is where we start to see the grit that
really defines him. He doesn't go back home.
He doesn't give up. He moves to New York City
and enters what we could call his bootstrap or
labor hustle phase. This is the part that feels
like a movie montage. He's not sitting around
feeling sorry for himself. He gets a job at the
New York Times building, right? Yes. But not
as a writer or an editor. He's a freight elevator
operator. Literally the ground floor. Lower than
the ground floor usually. But picture this. By
day, he's hauling heavy newsprint and executives
up and down a shaft. By night, he's sprinting
to City College of New York, taking tuition -free
night classes. And he's not just scraping by.
He graduates summa cum laude in 1935. Which just
proves that Harvard's issue with him was never
about his intellect. Never. And armed with that
degree, he enters the Civil Service. He starts
as an examiner and rises up to chief of the Civil
Service Commission eventually. But early on,
he gets a job at the New York City Department
of Welfare. And this is where he encounters the
actual mechanism of Northern racism. Right, because
it wasn't the whites' only signs of the South.
Exactly. It was a temporary employee designation.
Break that down for us. How does being temporary
relate to racism? It was a very clever loophole.
If you were a permanent civil service employee,
you had job security, a pension, and a clear
path to promotion. But the city would hire black
workers almost exclusively as provisionals or
temporaries. Meaning they could just be fired
at any time. Fired without cause. paid less,
and crucially ineligible for the benefits that
white workers got. It was a way to maintain a
segregated workforce within an integrated system.
Guinea saw this, and he realized he couldn't
fix it by just being a good employee. He could
only fix it if they organized. So he becomes
a union man. And not just a member, he climbs
the ladder fast. Looking at his biography, there
are a lot of acronyms here. SCMA, SCMU, UPW.
It's a bit of an alphabet soup. What was he actually
leading? Well, it starts small. Organizing his
local welfare office. But he's really good at
it. He merges his group with others and eventually
they become part of the state, county, and municipal
workers union, and then the UPW, the United Public
Workers. Got it. And this is all under the umbrella
of the CIO. Think of the CIO at the time as the
militant aggressive wing of the labor movement
that was actually willing to organize black workers
when other unions wouldn't touch them. So he's
moving up in the major leagues of labor. Well,
yeah, by 1948, he is the international secretary
treasurer of the UPW. That's the second highest
rank in the entire union. He's representing.
tens of thousands of government employees. And
he wasn't afraid to take shots at the boss either.
There's a quote in the sources from 1951 that
blew me away. He explicitly stated that the U
.S. government was the nation's biggest Jim Crow
employer. It's a devastating critique. because
it was demonstrably true. He was pointing out
the sheer hypocrisy of the U .S. fighting for
freedom abroad while systematically underpaying
and segregating Black workers in its own federal
bureaus. He wasn't just asking for a 20 -cent
raise. He was attacking the structural racism
of the government. He had serious political ambition,
too. He ran for Manhattan borough president in
1949. A historic run. He was the first Black
candidate nominated for that office by any party.
He ran on the American Labor Party ticket. And
he didn't win, but looking at the numbers, he
didn't exactly get embarrassed either. No, not
at all. He lost to Robert Wagner, but he secured
38 percent of the vote for a black third party
candidate to pull nearly 40 percent of the vote
in 1949. That shows he had massive support on
the streets. He was a powerhouse. But then the
wind shifts. We enter the 1950s. The Red Scare
is kicking off. And being a loud, aggressive
labor leader who talks openly about race and
inequality suddenly becomes very dangerous. This
is a major turning point in the mid -century
labor movement. Cold War anxiety was at its absolute
peak. And what we see in the historical record
is that the UPW was scrutinized heavily for connections
to the Communist Party. Right. And to be clear
to our listeners, we are just looking at the
historical facts of what happened here. The political
establishment at the time targeted these groups.
Exactly. The UPW was one of the most anti -racist
unions in the country and it was purged. The
CIO, under immense political pressure, kicked
the UPW out in 1950 due to those communist affiliations.
By 1953, the union was effectively dissolved.
So let's pause on the implication of that. This
effectively destroyed a massive vehicle for black
labor power in the public sector. Yes. Guinier
was left without a union, without a platform,
and facing intense scrutiny. This is what I'd
call his wilderness years. Most people would
have vanished into obscurity here, but Guinier
just pivots again. He absolutely refuses to disappear.
He's ousted from national labor leadership, so
what does he do? He goes back to school again.
In the mid -1950s, he enrolls at NYU Law School.
In his mid -40s. Yeah. He earns his law degree
in 1959. And during this time, he shifts his
focus to local community organizing. He's involved
with the Harlem Affairs Committee, the National
Negro Labor Council. He basically keeps his organizational
skills sharp. He stays in the fight, even if
he's not on the national stage. Which brings
us to the final and maybe most surprising act.
The year is 1968, 1969. The context here is huge.
Student protests are everywhere. Demands for
representation are forcing institutions to change.
Right. The Urban Center at Columbia is found
around this time where Guinea actually worked
briefly. Yeah. And Harvard is not immune to this
pressure. The students that are demanding a curriculum
that actually reflects their history, they want
an Afro -American studies department. And the
administration is cornered. They have to do something,
but they need someone to run it. And this is
where the stars align in the weirdest way, because
they need someone with academic credentials,
but who also deeply understands the Black experience,
community organization, and struggle. And who
is sitting in New York. with a Harvard background,
sort of a city college degree, a law degree,
and decades of hardcore organizational leadership.
So in 1969, the man who was bureaucratically
gaslit out of the dorms returns as a full professor
and the first chairman of the Afro -American
Studies Department. It's incredible vindication.
It is. But we can't let the feel -good headline
fool us. He wasn't walking into a victory lap.
He was walking into a new battleground. Right.
He had a quote about this time that was just
incredibly vivid. He said, the faculty council
expects me to run the department as I would run
a race. They bind my feet, tie my hands, gag
and blindfold me, and then want me to do a good
job. He knew exactly what was happening. You
have to understand the traditional Harvard faculty
largely looked down on black studies. They didn't
think it was a serious standalone discipline.
They thought it should just be folded into existing
departments like history or English. This led
to a huge public clash, didn't it? The records
detail a televised debate he had on a show called
Positively Black in 1973. He was debating another
black professor, Martin Kielsen. This debate
is crucial to understanding the era. Martin Kilson
was a professor of government at Harvard, and
Kilson argued the integrationist view. He essentially
said we shouldn't segregate ourselves into a
separate department. We should be part of the
history department, the political science department.
That's how the field gains legitimacy. Which
on paper sounds reasonable to some. Why isolate
yourself right? But Guinear came back with the
ultimate labor organizer reality tech. He pointed
out that it's impossible to integrate when those
departments, like English and Economics at Harvard
at that very moment, had zero black faculty members.
Zero. So his argument was, if we don't have our
own house, we're just going to be guests in someone
else's house. Someone who historically hasn't
even wanted us there. Exactly. He argued fiercely
for autonomy. His mission statement was that
he wanted to study the Black experience from
the point of view of the people who have lived
that experience. That phrase, from the point
of view of the people who have lived that experience,
that's the key, isn't it? It's about agency.
It is all about agency. And remember his background.
He wasn't a traditional ivory tower academic.
He wanted that department to be a hub. He was
bringing the perspective of the working people
into Harvard, and the administration often fought
him on it. But he held that line until he retired
in 1980 as Professor Emeritus. And we really
can't talk about his legacy without talking about
his personal life in the next generation. He
was married to Doris Cumberbatch and later Eugenia
Papron, known as Jeannie. And they raised a daughter
who took that fighting spirit and ran with it.
Lani Guinia. She became a famous civil rights
lawyer and a tenured professor at Harvard Law
School. So the granddaughter of the woman who
moved to Boston with nothing becomes a tenured
law professor at the very place that kicked her
father out. It's incredibly poetic. Lonnie actually
had a beautiful tribute to her father. She said
he taught me to speak in my own voice. You can
see the direct line there. Ewert fought for a
space to exist and Lonnie fought for the legal
frameworks to protect that existence. Ewert Guigné
passed away in 1990. When you step back and look
at this whole map, from the segregated canal
zone, to the phantom letter, the freight elevator,
the union organizing, and finally the Harvard
chair, what is the big takeaway for you? I think
his life proves that academic careers and intellectualism
aren't just formed in libraries. His academic
perspective was completely informed by his gritty
labor roots. He showed that the knowledge gained
from struggle is rigorous, and it's necessary
for institutions to actually reflect reality.
And it highlights how the intersection of labor
rights and civil rights has always been tied
together. You can't separate the two. You really
can't. That brings me to a question I want to
leave you, our listeners, with today. Guinier
was adamant about having a standalone autonomous
space for black studies because he knew the existing
departments excluded those voices. Right. Today,
in universities and even in corporate structures,
we hear a lot about interdisciplinary work or
integration. But looking at the world today,
Have those traditional structures actually changed
enough to make Guinier's standalone model obsolete?
Or is his argument about complete autonomy still
the only way to ensure the story is told correctly
by the people who lived it? It's a fascinating
question to ponder. Something for you to chew
on as you go about your day. Thanks for helping
us unpack the incredible lives of Uart Guinier.
Always a pleasure to be here. And thank you for
listening. We'll see you on the next Deep Dive.