Harris Wofford
Harris Wofford
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Harris Wofford

Harris Llewellyn Wofford Jr. (April 9, 1926 – January 21, 2019) was an American attorney, civil rights activist, and Democratic Party politician who represented Pennsylvania in the United States Senate from 1991 to 1995. A noted advocate of national service and volunteering, Wofford was also the fifth president of Bryn Mawr College from 1970 to 1978, served as chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party in 1986, served as Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry in the cabinet of Governor Bob Casey Sr. from 1987 to 1991, and was a surrogate for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. He introduced Obama in Philadelphia at the National Constitution Center before Obama's speech on race in America, "A More Perfect Union."

Wofford was born in 1926 in Manhattan, New York City, the son of Estelle Allison (née Gardner) and Harris Llewellyn Wofford. He was born to a wealthy and prominent Southern family.

At age 11 he accompanied his widowed grandmother on a six-month world tour. They spent Christmas Eve in Bethlehem, visited Shanghai shortly after the Imperial Japanese Army captured it, spent time in India where Wofford became "fascinated" by Mahatma Gandhi and visited Rome, where they saw Benito Mussolini announce Italy's withdrawal from the League of Nations and a subsequent fascist parade. While attending Scarsdale High School, he was inspired by Clarence Streit's plea for a world government to found the Student Federalists. By the time he was 18, the organization had grown so large that Newsweek predicted he would become president.

He served in the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War and was a 1948 graduate of the University of Chicago. After eight months on a fellowship in India, conducting a study of the recently assassinated Gandhi, he and his wife Clare returned to America. He subsequently enrolled at historically black Howard Law School, the first white male student to do so. After one year, he concluded his studies at Yale Law School, where he received his law degree in June 1954. He began his public service career as a legal assistant for Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh on the United States Commission on Civil Rights, serving from 1957 to 1959. In 1959, he became a law professor at University of Notre Dame. He was an early supporter of the Civil Rights Movement in the South in the 1950s, accompanying Indian activist Ram Manohar Lohia on a tour of the South in 1951 and becoming a friend and unofficial advisor to Martin Luther King Jr.

Wofford first met John F. Kennedy in 1947 at a party at Clare Boothe Luce's Connecticut home. Wofford's political career began in 1960 when Kennedy asked him to join his presidential campaign and work with Sargent Shriver on winning over the "Negro vote".

When Martin Luther King was imprisoned shortly before the election, Wofford and Shriver persuaded Kennedy to call King's wife, Coretta Scott King, who faced the specter of her husband sentenced to hard labor in a Georgia prison for a minor traffic violation while she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. This prompted Martin Luther King Sr. to switch his endorsement from Richard Nixon to Kennedy without the knowledge of Ted Sorensen, Ted Kennedy and Kenneth O'Donnell. Following the phone call, Wofford and other Kennedy aides assembled a pamphlet that referenced the call, printed on blue paper and known as the "blue bomb"; some 2 million copies were circulated, mostly through African American churches—"below the registry of the news and white culture. It had enormous influence among black voters."

In 1961, Kennedy appointed him as a Special Assistant to the President for Civil Rights. In the White House, he served as chairman of the Subcabinet Group on Civil Rights. Wofford was instrumental in the formation of the Peace Corps and served as the Peace Corps' special representative to Africa and director of operations in Ethiopia. He was appointed associate director of the Peace Corps in 1964 and held that position until 1966. He also participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. Wofford's book Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties details his years in the civil rights movement and the creation of the Peace Corps.

In 1966, Wofford left politics to become president of the State University of New York at Old Westbury. At the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Wofford risked his career by allowing himself to be arrested in protest of police brutality. In 1970, he became president of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, holding that post until 1978.

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