Redeemed

An excerpt from the NY Times Race/Related by Eli Hager -

Michelle Jones was released in August after two decades in prison.
Now a Ph.D. candidate at N.Y.U., Ms. Jones is being heralded
as an extraordinary self-made scholar of history.
Damon Winter/The New York Times

In April, I received an email from a source: a teacher at a women’s prison in Indiana. In it, she wrote almost in passing that one of her students — who had been incarcerated for more than two decades for the murder of her 4-year-old son — was now getting out, and had already been “accepted at N.Y.U., Harvard and a host of other top grad schools...”

You don’t hear that every day, I thought.

And that was before I knew that Harvard’s top brass, including its president and provost, had taken the highly unusual step of overruling their history department’s selection of this extraordinary student, Michelle Jones, citing her crime.

To Ms. Jones’s many supporters, her story is about her profound accomplishments and her joyful personality. Their goal was in part to convey to the world all she had achieved while in prison — conducting original archival research without the internet, publishing widely, presenting her groundbreaking findings by video-chat to historians’ conferences, and winning the loyal support of the top academics in her field, all without knowing it would lead to any concrete reward.

https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/2017/09/14/race-related?nlid=38867499