Mr. Ogletree, affectionately known as Tree, rose from an impoverished childhood to a celebrated public defender in Washington, a leading legal theorist at Harvard Law School, and an attorney for such high-profile clients like Tupac Shakur and Anita Hill.
The killings, sometimes described as a race riot, were triggered by the arrest of a Black teenage shoe shiner who had stepped into an elevator with a White elevator operator, who then screamed; according to one popular account, the teenager had stepped on the back of her shoe. Much of Tulsa’s prosperous Black community was subsequently destroyed, with 40 blocks razed, more than 10,000 people left homeless and some 300 killed.
An Oklahoma state commission recommended reparations for the massacre’s victims, but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2005, leaving in place a lower court’s ruling that too much time had passed since the event. Mr. Ogletree was similarly unsuccessful in a 2002 lawsuit, filed on behalf of the descendants of enslaved people, which argued that companies including Lehman Brothers, Aetna and R.J. Reynolds had profited from slavery.
Mr. Ogletree remained optimistic that reparations would eventually come to pass. In the meantime, he sought a more immediate response to the pain he and his forebearers had felt for generations. He had tried to research his family history, he said, but found it difficult to trace his lineage through long years of slavery and bondage.in 2001. “If I could take the step to fill that void, to me that would be important. There would be no anger. There would just be a sense of closure.
While at Harvard Law, he was elected president of the Black American Law Students Association . He joined the D.C. Public Defender Service after graduating and resigned in 1985, after beingMr. Ogletree worked in private practice before joining Harvard full-time in 1989. He also served as chairman of the Southern Center for Human Rights and was board chairman of the University of the District of Columbia.
He married Pamela Barnes, a Stanford classmate who went on to lead Children’s Services of Roxbury, a Massachusetts nonprofit, in 1975. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children, Charles J. Ogletree III and Rashida Ogletree-George; two brothers; two sisters; and four grandchildren.
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