Ewart & Eugenia Guinier

When Ewart Gladstone Guinier and his wife Eugenia moved to Hollis in 1956, they were already two of the most remarkable people in America. He was a son of Jamaican immigrants who had become a labor leader, political trailblazer, and would go on to found Harvard’s Afro-American Studies department. She was a Jewish civil rights activist who had married a Black man at a time when such a marriage was illegal in many states — and who had come to Hollis to integrate it.

Ewart Gladstone Guinier: From Jamaica to Harvard

Ewart Gladstone Guinier was the son of Jamaican immigrants — a powerful and passionate orator who became a lawyer, a progressive union organizer and labor leader, a community representative, a political candidate, and a professor. He served as chair on a committee of the Urban League and on other borough and local organizations, reflecting what the transcript describes as his “constant and unequivocal commitment to community and the underrepresented.”

Guinier was a prominent trade unionist who served as international secretary for the United Public Workers of America. He was also the first Black candidate to be nominated by a political party — the American Labor Party — for the Manhattan borough presidency. One of only two Black students admitted to Harvard in 1929, he would go on to become the founder and first department head of Harvard University’s Afro-American Studies department in 1969. He got there the hard way, and he opened the door for everyone who came after.

Eugenia Paprin Guinier: A Civil Rights Champion in Her Own Right

Eugenia Guinier (née Paprin) — known as Geni — has been described as a civil rights champion in her own right. She was a social activist who served as director of the Honolulu Labor Canteen, an alternative to the segregated USO in Hawaii, where she met Ewart during the war. She married him when interracial marriage was illegal in many states, and the couple moved to Hollis to integrate a neighborhood of proud working-class Irish and Italian families — as the first family of color on the block.

Within six years, she was reportedly the only white person still living in the neighborhood. She stayed. Professionally, Geni was a speech therapist and a high school teacher of English. Friends once said she had “married a so-called race man.” She was proud of it.

A Family That Changed America

The Guiniers’ daughter, Lani Guinier, would grow up to become one of America’s most important legal scholars. But the foundation was laid here, in Hollis, by two people who had spent their entire lives making America more honest about what it claimed to believe.