Big shoes for the next generations

 

Civil rights leader and lawyer Charles Ogletree (pictured here at a book talk in 2010) was a regular summer resident on Martha's Vineyard, one of an array of Black luminaries who make the island off Massachusetts their own place. No wonder the Obamas bought a residence there.

From the New York Times:

A son of California tenant farmers and the first in his family to graduate from high school, Professor Ogletree rose from poverty to become one of the most prominent civil rights lawyers in the country, leaving a mark on the courtroom and the classroom.

As a litigator, he defended clients both famous and unknown, including Tupac Shakur and the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, whom he helped to sue the city and the state of Oklahoma for restitution in 2003.

“He was determined to see that Black people were treated fairly in the courts, whether they were an Anita Hill or a Tupac or an indigent person in the streets of Boston,” Henry Louis Gates Jr., a close friend and fellow scholar at Harvard, said in a phone interview.

The island remembers Ogletree for his fishing prowess.

In 2011, he took in the largest bluefish — at 15-and-a-half pounds — during the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby.

That generation of civil rights luminaries will be missed.