JERUSALEM – The lawyer representing Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor at the center of a national race controversy, was a mentor of both Barack and Michelle Obama and served on the president's black advisory council.
Charles Ogletree Jr., himself a Harvard University professor, is closely linked to the Black Panthers and to radical black ideology. He is a key member of the reparations movement and once pursued the possibility of bringing a class action lawsuit to win reparations for descendants of African slaves.
"I met Barack when he arrived at Harvard Law School in fall of 1988. He was quiet and unassuming, but had an incredibly sharp mind and a thirst for knowledge," Ogletree said in an interview last year with Essence Magazine.
Gates and obama are role players.
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Ogletree and Gates gave starkly different reports of the incident than police.
A report from Sgt. James Crowley said Gates was shouting so loudly it was impossible to talk on his police radio. Crowley said he handcuffed Gates on the porch after the professor shouted, "This is what happens to black men in America."