An Arresting Look at Race

A Harvard law professor explores Gates-gate

The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race, Class and Crime in America, by Charles Ogletree. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. $25.00, 256 pp.
One hundred and forty seven years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, four decades after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and only months after the first black president was inaugurated, a world-renowned African American scholar was presumed guilty of attempting to break into his own home and was arrested for “disorderly conduct.”
Despite the remarkable achievements in American civil rights, racial profiling still affects a disheartening number of minorities regardless of their social status or affluence. In his latest book, The Presumption of Guilt, Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, uses the arrest of his friend, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as a window into the nationwide tensions between African Americans and law enforcement.
Local to National Drama
Ogletree begins by detailing the much-disputed events of July 16, 2009. As Gates’ lawyer throughout the entire ordeal, Ogletree is naturally somewhat skewed in his telling of the story, but presents the perspectives of both Gates and Sgt. James Crowley, the Cambridge, MA., police officer who arrested him at his home. Ultimately, though, Ogletree rejects Crowley’s assertion that Gates was aggressive and disorderly; he believes the arrest can be traced, in the end, to race-based assumptions.
Ogletree aptly chronicles how a small and isolated incident quickly erupted into a national debate. The media firestorm put President Barack Obama in a precarious position, as a friend of both Ogletree and Gates and as a president who generally shied away from discussing racial issues. Ogletree concludes rather optimistically that “the arrest of Professor Gates brought national attention to the issues of racial disparity in the criminal justice system, and reminded us that these issues still must be resolved.”
The Injustice of Profiling
Ogletree then uses the Gates saga to launch into a broader discussion of racial profiling. The story of Robert Wilkins, an African American lawyer in Washington, D.C. and a graduate of Harvard Law School, is a particularly telling example of racial profiling by law enforcement. On the way home from his grandfather’s funeral in Chicago, Wilkins and his family were pulled over for speeding on Maryland’s Interstate 68. The officer not only demanded to search their car, but also told the family they could not leave until a dog came to sniff the car. After the dog found no trace of drugs or contraband, the men were finally allowed to get back into their car after the “embarrassing and humiliating procedure.”
Wilkins went on to file a successful lawsuit which resulted in the repeal of the Maryland state police policy of using “race as a factor in determining whom to stop, detain, or search without further evidence.” Ogletree uses this case to testify to the arduous task of eliminating racial profiling; not everyone who is subjected to this humiliation is likely to be a powerful lawyer, of course, and many cases go unreported.
Missing Perspectives
Harvard readers might also be interested in the stories of five Harvard affiliates who  in various ways faced discrimination from the Cambridge Police Department or Harvard University Police Department. Combined with the other narratives, these tend to convince the reader of the continuing importance of combating racism in American society, despite our significant progress over the years.
Ogletree’s book, however, fails to address both sides of this very complicated issue. Clearly African Americans who are incarcerated are not all victims of racial discrimination. The troubling thing about Ogletree’s book is that, by focusing on racial profiling, he takes precedence away from the social and economic factors that really drive the racial disproportion in America’s prison population.
The book also lacked the perspective of law enforcement officials. Ogletree provides an explanation for racial profiling—poor police training—but interviews with law enforcement could have made the book more thorough, and may even have supported Ogletree’s argument.
Fulfilling King’s Dream
Nevertheless, The Presumption of Guilt captures a snapshot of a pivotal time in America’s history, a time when Americans can elect a man of African descent to be leader of the free world, yet when people are still often judged by the color of their skin. Ogletree’s book provides a useful, if incomplete, starting point for making changes in law enforcement that would improve this situation.
Melanie Guzman ’14 is a Contributing Writer.