Harold R. Washington Jr., activist, ground-breaking Harvard professor

September 11, 2011|By Gil Bliss, Globe Correspondent

In 1968, Harvard University’s Crimson newspaper published the demands of the campus’s black students, among them more courses relevant to black students and more black faculty to teach them.

Nearly 18 months later, Harvard created the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and named nine new black faculty to teach the college’s first black studies courses.

Harold R. “Hap’’ Washington Jr. was among the ground-breaking instructors, hired during a time of social upheaval in the country. His time at Harvard was among many stops he made during a lifetime of fighting for civil rights and representing society’s downtrodden.

Mr. Washington died July 22 at his home in the Virgin Islands, where he had lived for 20 years. He was 76 and succumbed to complications of coronary disease.

Known ubiquitously as Hap, he was considered a forceful and motivating speaker, in the classroom and the court of law.

His motto, friends and family said, was, “If I don’t say it - who will?’’ and he held fast to that ethic through his latter years, when he served as a public defender in the Virgin Islands, where he had gone on a government grant and liked it enough to stay.

Mr. Washington was born in Manhattan to Harold R. Washington Sr., a tailor and former Negro leagues baseball player, and his wife Ermine (Pearson), a teacher.

He grew up amid veiled racism in New York City, but the family’s move to South Carolina introduced him to the epicenter of blatant segregation, said his former wife, Judith E. (Hawthorne) Washington, of Durham, N.C.

“When he came south, he was dealing with ‘in-your-face’ racism; and you were forced to confront it,’’ she said.

He encountered more overt racism during a stint in the US Air Force, when a racial confrontation with an officer led to banishment in Greenland, according to one of his twin sons, Kevin E. Washington, also of Durham.

“He had a keen understanding about how racism impacted a person’s life,’’ his son said.

By the time he entered Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C., Mr. Washington felt equipped to use his gift of oratory and activist spirit to join the fight for civil rights.

At college, he met his wife, who was studying mathematics. “He was outspoken, and while I was impressed with his intellect and speech, I thought he was too outspoken,’’ said Judith Washington, an attorney for Legal Aid.

“After a while, I learned to appreciate it, and we began seeing each other,’’ she said. They eloped in 1962, moved to the Bronx, and had the twins a year later.

He became more involved in the civil rights movement, was a charter member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and took part in protests and sit-ins.