Harris Wofford, Special Assistant to President Kennedy, served principally as Coordinator of Federal Civil Rights Policy for the White House. He organized and headed the subcabinet group on civil rights, designed to promote civil rights action by federal agencies and departments, to survey and encourage progress in minority hiring and promotion, and to coordinate interdepartmental cooperation on civil rights issues. Mr. Wofford was largely responsible for John F. Kennedy’s highly publicized call to Coretta Scott King after her husband was arrested and jailed on trumped up charges during civil rights demonstrations in 1960. Despite initial protests from campaign manager Robert Kennedy, the call turned out to be crucial in winning the vote of African Americans in an extremely close election. In 1962, Mr. Wofford left the White House to relocate to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in order to oversee African operations of the Peace Corps and to head its Ethiopian program. Mr. Wofford returned to the United States in 1964 to serve as Associate Director of the Peace Corps. In 1965, he joined Martin Luther King for the historic voting rights protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
1926 Born, New York, New York
1944-1945 Aviation trainee, U.S. Army Air Forces
1948 B.A., University of Chicago
1949 Study Fellow, India
1950 Study Fellow, Israel
1953-1954 Assistant to U.S. Ambassador Chester Bowles
1954-1958 Law Associate, Covington & Burling, Washington, D.C.
1954 L.L.B., Yale University
1954 J.D., Howard University
1958-1959 Legal Assistant, Commission on Civil Rights
1959-1960 Associate Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame
1960-1962 Legal Assistant to John F. Kennedy
1962-1964 Special Representative for Africa and Director of Ethiopian Program, U.S. Peace Corps, Washington, D.C.
1964-1966 Associate Director, Peace Corps
1967-1970 President, State University of New York College at Old Westbury
1970-1978 President, Bryn Mawr College
1978- Counsel, Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis
1992 United States Senator from Pennsylvania
Author
It’s up to us: Federal World Government in Our Time, 1946
Road to the World Republic: Policy and Strategy for Federalists, 1948
IndiaAfire(with wife, Clare Wofford), 1951
Report of the U.C. Commission on Civil Rights(co-editor), 1959
Embers of the World: Conversations with Scott Buchanan (editor), 1970
Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties, 1980
Source
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004. Reproduced in BiographyResource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: The Gale Group, 2004. http://0-galenet.galegroup.com.library.simmons.edu:80/servlet/BioRC