Michael Wenger Papers

Michael Wenger was born to Emanuel and Rose Wenger on March 4, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at Queens College, City University of New York and received his B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Education in 1965. At Queens College, Wenger served as the Congress of Racial Equality (C.O.R.E.) campus chapter president circa 1963-1964 and as chairman of the Student Help Project during the 1964 calendar year. Wenger tutored under-served school children in South Jamaica, Queens from 1962-1963. In 1963, he and a group of 16 Queens College students traveled to Prince Edward County, Virginia to tutor black students who had been denied a public education since 1959 when the county closed its public schools rather than comply with court-mandated integration.

When Wenger returned from Prince Edward County, Virginia, he was awarded, along with Stan Shaw (a fellow student participant in the Virginia Student Help Project), the B’nai B’rith Human Relations Award on April 23, 1964. Wenger was involved in several other activist activities, including the organization of Freedom Week, an event sponsored by C.O.R.E. in 1964.

After his graduation from Queens College in 1965, Wenger taught special education in New York from 1965-1967. In 1967, he moved to Berkeley, West Virginia where he became the director of the Community Education Project, an anti-poverty program. Over the next several years, Wenger worked for the state of West Virginia in various community action positions; including Director of Federal/State programs for Charleston, West Virginia, Chief of the Division of Community Development for the Office of the Governor of West Virginia, and Deputy Commissioner for Operations for the West Virginia Department of Welfare.

In 1981, Wenger moved to Maryland where he became the state’s Washington Representative for the Appalachian Regional Commission. At the same time, he wrote a biweekly column on race relations for the Prince George’s Journal. In September 1997, Wenger became Deputy Director of Outreach and Program Development for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race. In 1998, he began his affiliation with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. Wenger is currently a Senior Fellow with the Center and serves as the Editorial Consultant to FOCUS magazine, the Center’s bi-monthly magazine. He is also an Adjunct Faculty Member of the Department of Sociology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., teaching courses on institutional racism.

Over the course of his career Wenger has written several publications, and frequently gives presentations that discuss the issue of race and race relations in the United States.