Harvard professor Danielle Allen weighing run for Massachusetts governor
Updated Dec 15, 2020;
Danielle Allen, a political theorist at Harvard University, announced Monday she is exploring a campaign for governor.
She tweeted a campaign video, which opened with her reciting a quote by Toni Morrison: “If you’re free, you free others. If you have power, you empower others.”
The words, Allen said, “embody the soul” of her family. After graduating high school, Allen went on to earn degrees from Princeton University and a Ph.D from University of Cambridge before enrolling in a Ph.D program in government at Harvard.
Her final degree, Allen said, achieved a goal set by her grandmother: “a self-taught community nurse in the segregated South” who wished to see a grandchild go to college in Massachusetts, the first state in the nation to end enslavement.