Just six months after he graduated from Harvard, Chico Wilson '70 charmed a group of alumni lawyers gathered at the Harvard Club of New York--despite the fact that his t-shirt and jeans clashed with the tuxedos of the other men in the room.

With what friend Lee A. Daniels '71 called carefree intellectualism, Wilson upstaged Daniels, who was the invited speaker that evening.

"It was clear that he should have been the speaker and not me," Daniels says. "Regaling the guests with tales about student activism at Harvard, speaking French with a lawyer from France...it was clear Chico was a committed intellectual, but he wore all of that stuff very lightly."

"If you saw Chico at a party, or at a very, very light social situation," Daniels adds, "he could act like he had not a care in the world."

Ernest James Wilson III, as he was more officially but less commonly known as an undergraduate, is described by many who knew him as a man with a startling capacity to fit into any environment.

A renowned student activist who was instrumental in the birth of the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969, Wilson also pursued less radical activities.

He was the first Black member of the fly, a finals club, and he was the first Black editor of the Lampoon, a semi-secret Bow Street social organization which occasionally publishes a so-called humor magazine.

Wilson "might be speaking French, talking jive or speaking straight standard English," says Robert L. Hall '69, who worked with Wilson on the Afro-Am ad hoc committee. He was always controlled and comfortable, "almost chameleon-like."

Wilson, who is now the deputy director of the Center for Strategic and international Studies in Washington, D.C., has worn many hats in his post-Harvard life.

From academia to ambassadorial travel, Wilson has followed a meandering path--almost like that of the Congo River, which Wilson voyaged with money from a Rockefeller Grant just after graduation.

As a member of President Clinton's post-election transition team in 1993, Wilson journeyed to Africa once again--this time accompanying First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to Nelson Mandela's inauguration as president of South Africa.

At the time, Wilson was director of International Programs and Resources at the National Security Council.

Wilson says he was recruited for the job at least in part through his wife's contacts: Francille Rusan Wilson ran against Hillary Rodham for Wellesley class president in 1969. Mrs. Wilson lost, but she maintained close contact with the future first lady through succeeding decades.

The Harvard Years

When Wilson was a first-year at what was then just plain Harvard, women were only permitted in men's dorm rooms between certain--and by today's standards tame--hours: five to seven p.m.