Harold Washington - Northwestern University School of Law

Northwestern University School of Law

Washington then studied at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. During this time, Washington divorced from Dorothy Finch. By some accounts, Harold and Dorothy had simply grown apart after Washington was sent to war during the first year of his marriage. Others saw both as young and headstrong, the relationship doomed from the beginning. Another friend of Washington's deemed Harold "not the marrying kind." He would not marry again, but continued to have relationships with other women; those who knew his longtime secretary would later report her commenting "If every woman Harold slept with stood at one end of City Hall, the building would sink five inches into LaSalle Street".

At Northwestern, Washington was the only black student in his class. (He joined six women in the class, one of them being Dawn Clark Netsch). As at Roosevelt, he entered school politics. In 1951, his last year, he was elected treasurer of the Junior Bar Association (JBA). The election was largely symbolic, however, and Washington's attempts to give the JBA more authority at Northwestern were largely unsuccessful.

On campus, Washington joined the Nu Beta Epsilon fraternity, largely because he and the other minorities which constituted the fraternity were blatantly excluded from the other fraternities on campus. Overall, Washington stayed away from the activism that defined his years at Roosevelt. During the evenings and weekends, he worked to supplement his GI Bill income. He received his J.D. in 1952.

Read more about this topic:  Harold Washington

Famous quotes containing the words university, school and/or law:

    The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.
    Albert Borgman, U.S. educator, author. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1992)

    Their school a crowd, his master solitude;
    Through Jonathan Swift’s dark grove he passed, and there
    Plucked bitter wisdom that enriched his blood.
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)