Celebrating The Life Of Lani Guinier, Civil Rights Champion and Legal Scholar

Photo Courtesy of Associated Press

A champion for voting rights, civil rights theorist and the first Black woman to earn tenure at Harvard Law School, Lani Guinier died Friday.

Carol Lani Guinier, the Bennett Boskey Professor of law emerita at Harvard Law School, where she was the Black woman granted tenure, was 71 and died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

Her cousin, Sherrie Russell-Brown, told CNN that Guinier had passed away peacefully, “surrounded by family and friends.”

A graduate of Radcliffe College and Yale Law School, Ms. Guinier was born in New York City in 1950.

She was a daughter of Ewart Guinier, the first chairman of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies, and Eugenia Paprin Guinier, who was known as Genii. Ms. Guinier’s mother was a civil rights activist, a speech therapist, and a high school English teacher.

According to her Harvard Law School biography, Guinier had worked in the department’s Civil Rights Division before leading the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s.

She was widely known for her 1993 nomination to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which was met with a swift rebuke from the Republican Party due to her support for affirmative action and consequently failed.

In 1986, Ms. Guinier married Nolan Bowie, a fellow emeritus lawyer at the Kennedy School of Government and had taught at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Guinier’s son, Niko Bowie, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, was a young boy at the time of the nomination.

“My mother taught me from a very early age the meaning of courage,” he said Friday, recalling how she declined to disavow her previous work, which drew criticism from conservatives.

In 1988, she joined the University of Pennsylvania Law School, becoming a tenured professor.

In a tribute sent to the Harvard Law School community, John F. Manning, the law school’s dean, wrote that Ms. Guinier’s “scholarship changed our understanding of democracy – of why and how the voices of the historically underrepresented must be heard and what it takes to have a meaningful right to vote. It also transformed our understanding of the educational system and what we must do to create opportunities for all members of our diverse society to learn, grow, and thrive in school and beyond.”

“Lani devoted her life to justice, equality, empowerment, and democracy and made the world better as a result,” Manning wrote. “Her voice, her wisdom, her integrity, her bravery, her caring for others, her imagination and rigorous thinking, and her unerring sense of justice will inspire those who knew her and those who come to know of her life and legacy; in the years to come.”

In addition to her husband and son, Ms. Guinier leaves three sisters, Chlotilde Stenson, Sary Guinier and Marie Guinier, and a granddaughter, Cora. May she rest in peace and power.