[2] His parents were Jamaican immigrants living under segregation in the Canal Zone; his father worked as a lawyer and real estate agent, and his mother was a bookkeeper.

Guinier was one of only a few Black students at the university at the time, and he faced pervasive discrimination, including exclusion from the dormitory system and being ruled ineligible for financial aid.

[5] Guinier experienced outright social ostracism from white classmates, but was able to make friends with Black upper-class men, including Robert Weaver and Frank Snowden.

[3] As the Great Depression took hold, Guinier struggled to afford the costs of his education, and decided to leave Harvard after his sophomore year.

[4][3] In 1956, already midway through a career in labor organizing and politics, Guinier returned to graduate study and completed a law degree from New York University in 1959.

[2] In 1935, Ewart Guinier began working as head of the Men's Service Rating Bureau, part of the New York City Department of Welfare.

[3] Guinier's involvement with trade unionism began while he was at the Rating Bureau: he and other Black employees were only hired on a temporary basis, and they organized to advocate for permanent status.

The New York City locals left the SCMEA in the mid-1930s, to join the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as the State, County, and Municipal Workers Union (SCMU).

[4] Black workers made up one third of the UPW's membership, and the union's organizing efforts combated the racist and discriminatory practices of federal and state employers.

The Urban Center was founded in the aftermath of student and community protest over Columbia's role in maintaining a divide between the Morningside Heights and Harlem neighborhoods, which activists described as segregationist in both intent and result.

He started work there as a full professor in 1969, the year the Afro-American Studies department was founded in response to student protestors' demands for better academic representation.

Guinier also corresponded with students from all over the United States who wrote to him seeking advice and information to help them start Black Studies departments at their own institutions.

[8] Guinier spoke out against institutional racism at Harvard, and advocated for the inclusion of Black perspectives in the teaching and writing of American history.

[3] They met during his Army service in Hawaii; at the time, Genii was the director of the Honolulu Labor Canteen, a leftist alternative to the USO.