Race, Work, and Leadership

 

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A Case Study of Leading Change

The Founders of Harvard Business School’s African American Student Union

HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

I.

I am going to speak about 1968, but first, I want to take you back to the year 1900 for a moment. We tend to think of the past through our own frame of reference, more or less as a sepia version of the present. I remember reading about Harvard’s time capsule, the Chest of 1900, a record of life at the university at the turn of the century, and looking for some testimony in its contents about black life on campus back then.

Remember, according to W. E. B. Du Bois, only ten black men graduated from the college between 1900 and 1904. One reference I found was a note that a white student made about his black classmate, ...