Attorney, professor and founding member of the Peace Corps Richard Thornell died of covid-19 on April 28. He was 83.
Whether battling injustice, breaking color barriers, creating legacy programs or shaping the next generation of leaders, Thornell was known for his courageous leadership. He was the type to make moves rather than announcements, The Washington Post (WP) reported.
“Richard was in a quiet way at the forefront of so many things,” his lifelong best friend David Levering Lewis, a W.E.B. Du Bois biographer, told the Post.
In the 1960s, Thornell was instrumental in setting up the world’s first Peace Corps at the young age of 24. It was something he took great pride in according to his son Paul Thornell.
“For him, it was a lifelong sense of pride,” Paul told WP. “The Peace Corps is the thing that has lasted, in a meaningful way, longer than other things, and the fact that my dad had a central role in launching it, that meant a lot to him.”
It was not the only magnificent thing Thornell would do in his lifetime. Actually, being great seemed for him the rule and not the exception.
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A graduate of HBCU Fisk University and the second Black person to receive a degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Thornell often went against the grain of an unjust society.
In 1956, he took a road trip with white German peer Hans-Christoph Boemers through the South. He also served as special counsel to the NAACP in Washington and helped secure a presidential pardon for friend Preston King, who fled the country to avoid imprisonment for draft evasion, WP reported.
Thornell spent three decades teaching at Howard University’s Law School and helped then South African President Nelson Mandela’s administration draft the country’s constitution.
When it came to matters of justice, Thornell’s own alma mater wasn’t above reproach. While serving as a trustee at Fisk, Thronell blew the whistle on some problems at the school to local media, which led to a change in leadership, WP reported.
“That was really quite courageous … to be a trustee and a whistleblower at the same time,” Lewis told WP of his beloved friend. “His eye was really sharp to the way things should go, and if they weren’t going right, he’d kick over the traces.”
According to the Post, Thornell is survived by his wife Carolyn Atkinson Thronell, whom he was married to for nearly 50 years; sons David Thornell, Paul Thornell and Douglass Thornell; grandchildren Nolan and Lena Thornell; and sister Elizabth Quinitchett.
A memorial service will be held a later date, the family said.
