Name Charles Willie | ||
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Education Syracuse University, Morehouse College | ||
Charles Vert Willie (born October 8, 1927) is the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, Emeritus at Harvard University. He is a sociologist whose areas of research include desegregation, higher education, public health, race relations, urban community problems, and family life. Willie identifies himself as an applied sociologist who is concerned with solving social problems. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
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Biographical Information
Willie was born October 8, 1927, in Dallas, Texas, the grandson of Louis Willie, a former slave. He received his B.A. from Morehouse College in 1948 where he was class president, an M.A. from Atlanta University in 1949, and his Ph.D. in sociology from Syracuse University in 1957. He resides with his wife Mary Sue Willie in Concord, Massachusetts. He has three children who have careers in government (James Theodore Willie), architecture (Martin Charles Willie), and academia (Sarah Susannah Willie-LeBreton).
Career
Willie became the first African American professor at Syracuse University where he taught from 1950 to 1974. He served President John F. Kennedy as the Research Director of Washington Action for Youth, a delinquency-prevention planning program in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime from 1962-1964. He returned to Syracuse University from 1964-1966. In July 1965 he introduced his Morehouse College classmate, Martin Luther King Jr. at a speech at Syracuse University. In 1966-67, he was on leave from Syracuse as a Visiting Lecturer in Sociology at the Harvard Medical School in its Department of Psychiatry as part of the Laboratory of Community Psychiatry. He was chairman of the Department of Sociology and was vice president of student affairs 1972-1974 at Syracuse at the time he left Syracuse to accept a tenured position as professor of education at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education in 1974.
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Willie and nineteen others (from among over 1,000 candidates) to the President's Commission on Mental Health. Willie has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Social Science Research Council. He has served as vice president of the American Sociological Association and president (1974–75) of the Eastern Sociological Society.
Dr. Willie has also served as a consultant, expert witness, and court-appointed master in major school desegregation cases in various large cities including the landmark case of Boston (1974) from which emerged the "Controlled Choice" plan popularized by Willie and Michael Alves and used in Boston for 10 years and Cambridge for 20 years. Willie has done desegregation planning work in Hartford, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Little Rock, Milwaukee, San Jose, Seattle, and St. Louis; and in other municipalities such as St. Lucie County and Lee County, Florida, and Somerville, Cambridge, and Brockton, Massachusetts.
Willie is a lay member of the Episcopal Church in the United States, a former member of its Executive Council and is a past vice president of the House of Deputies, one of two houses, with the House of Bishops, that makes up the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Willie was the first African-American elected as Vice-President of the House of Deputies (1970. Although a lay member of this religious association, he was invited to deliver the ordination sermon at an irregular service held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Church of the Advocate, July 29, 1974 in which the first eleven women were ordained as priests in this denomination. Some members of the Episcopal Church were reluctant to acknowledge the priesthood of women, and the ordination was disputed. Meeting in emergency session in Chicago, the House of Bishops invalidated the ordination by a vote of 128 to 9 because the four officiating bishops had "not fulfilled constitutional and canonical requirements." Willie then resigned August 18, 1974 his elected office of vice-president, in protest at the Bishops' failure to uphold the ordination and accord women equal rights. Ms. Magazine designated him a male hero in its tenth anniversary issue (1982). He and forty other men were honored for taking courageous action in behalf of women.
Awards
In 2004 Willie received the American Sociological Association's William Foote Whyte Distinguished Career Award; in 2005 he was co-recipient with Charles Tilly of the ASA's W.E.B. DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award. He had previously received in 1994 the ASA's DuBois-Johnson-Frazier Award. In February 2006 Willie received the Eastern Sociological Society Merit Award, the highest award it can bestow on members.
A number of colleges and universities have conferred honorary doctoral degrees upon Willie including Syracuse University, 1992; Haverford College,2000; Episcopal Divinity School, 2004; Emerson College, 2008, and most recently Morgan State University, 2013. In June 2000 Syracuse University awarded Willie its George Arents Pioneer Medal, the highest alumni honor the University can bestow. In 2013 the Eastern Sociological Society established an annual award in Dr. Willie's name to be given to a minority graduate student who demonstrates exceptional scholarly promise, "in recognition of Willie's work on racial and ethnic minorities, his support of minority graduate students, and his invaluable contributions to ESS."