As Albert Einstein wrote elegantly about our experience of time and space, he also devoted his days to the process of social transformation: the question of how one world becomes another. He was concerned about not just the perils of progress—including modern science’s role in the creation of apocalyptic weapons—but also the promise of a more just society. From his very first years in the United States, Einstein wrote powerfully in opposition to American segregation, drawing on his personal experience of Nazi persecution as well as his ties to the long-standing African American community in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. In 1946, deep in the Jim Crow era, he visited the nation’s first degree-granting historically Black institution, Lincoln University, where he gave talks and accepted an honorary degree. Eighty years later, after searching through the archives of his correspondence that are housed in Princeton, I’m reflecting on the full scope of what we have inherited from him. Einstein was among the first faculty members of the Institute for Advanced Study, which was founded in …