Early in the Great Depression, William B. Gould III, an electrical engineer who was working as a radioman for the U.S. Navy, wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois asking about employment opportunities with the “Government of Abyssinia,” a sovereign nation composed of the territories known as the Ethiopian Empire.
The famed intellectual and civil rights activist replied, promising to pass along any leads, but ultimately that wasn’t necessary. Gould, who had recently been fired after his employer found out he was Black, secured other work and went on to a distinguished career, including 29 years with the U.S. Army helping to develop the first radar systems.
The letter to Du Bois was shared with Gould’s son, Stanford Law School Professor William B. Gould IV, while researching his new memoir, Those Who Travail and Are Heavy Laden: Memoir of a Labor Lawyer. (It had been discovered by an archivist at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which Gould III attended.) Gould said the letter was among “real stunners” of family history he encountered in writing the book, which chronicles his personal and professional life as one of the country’s leading scholars of labor and discrimination law, the first Black professor at Stanford Law School, and the first Black chairman of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Gould has written extensively about labor, discrimination, sports law, baseball, and his family history, including a book based on the diary of his great-grandfather who escaped from...
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