Richard T. Greener
Gifted, hardworking, and ambitious, Richard Theodore Greener achieved a lifetime of accomplishments as an educator, scholar, lawyer, politician, and diplomat. He also contended with painful choices about how best to survive and prosper in a country that denied people of color respect and equal rights. Greener is in the American history books for being the first Black graduate from Harvard University in 1870, and the first Black teacher at the University of South Carolina in late 1873.
Born on January 30, 1844 in Philadelphia, Greener’s mother moved the family to Boston and later Cambridge after efforts to locate Greener’s father, who had left the family when he was nine to pursue mining opportunities in California, failed and was presumed dead. In Boston, Greener attended the Broadway Grammar School until he was 14, then quit to support his mother in a variety of jobs, including night watchman. Eventually, he was able to make enough money to care for his family and send himself to school. Greener’s intelligence caught the eye of several employers and Franklin B. Sanborn, a teacher and reformer, helped Greener get into Oberlin College in Ohio – the first college in the nation to admit black students. Three years later, Greener transferred to Harvard College, where he won a Bowdoin Prize for elocution in his sophomore and senior years, and graduated in 1870. Three years later, Greener became Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where he served as librarian, taught Philosophy, and assisted in the Departments of Latin and Greek, Mathematics, and Constitutional History. In 1875, Greener became the first African American to be elected a member of the American Philological Association, the principal learned society for classical studies in North America. He studied at the University of South Carolina's Law School and received a LL.B. degree in 1876, graduating with honors. He was admitted to the Supreme Court of South Carolina in 1877 and the bar of the District of Columbia the next year. In 1882, he received a LL.D. conferred by Monrovia College, Liberia, Africa, and in 1907 was honored with another LL.D. conferred by Howard University.
During the administrations of President William McKinley and President Theodore Roosevelt, Greener was a prominent figure in national and international affairs. He became first secretary of New York's Grant Memorial Association, and assisted in raising funds to finance Grant's Tomb. In 1898, he was appointed United Consul to Bombay, India, and then transferred to Vladivostok, Russia, becoming the first American to hold this post.
After ending an extended marriage to Genevieve Fleet, the former and six children resettled in Boston, and Greener settled in Chicago with relatives in 1905. He held a job as an agent for an insurance company and practiced law, and occasionally lectured on his life and times for the remainder of his life. Richard Theodore Greener died of old age in Chicago on May 2, 1922.
Show Posts
Congrats bredda.
