Journal of Southern History

An important addition to the growing corpus of African American biography, this slender volume resurrects to historical memory Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922), a semi-obscure figure best known for being the first black graduate of Harvard College. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock, a distinguished professor emerita of education at the University of South Carolina, shows in this clear and straightforward narrative that Greener actually deserves recognition for several other important contributions to civil rights in the early Jim Crow era as well. Readers may even come away wondering why Greener is not placed alongside his more famous contemporaries Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois in the pantheon of great black leaders of his generation. [End Page 1021]

Born in Philadelphia to a black father and a mixed-race mother, Greener was nearly white in both skin color and facial features. Moving to the Boston area at age nine, he grew up poor and mostly fatherless. There he spent time in the presence and under the influence of some of the most renowned abolitionists in history. As a teen, he received help from benevolent whites to matriculate at Oberlin College in Ohio, Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, and finally Harvard. After graduating, he moved from place to place and job to job, restless and ambitious, habitually thrusting too "many irons in the fire" (p. 123). He did so partly because he was constantly seeking new ways to make money to support his family and partly because he wanted desperately to make a name for himself in public life.

Starting his career as a teacher at a school for African Americans in Philadelphia, Greener soon became a professor and librarian at the University of South Carolina and, later, the dean of Howard University Law School. Active in Republican Party politics, he sought patronage and received positions in the U.S. Treasury Department and the post office before being appointed the first black diplomat to a white country—Russia. Meanwhile, he opened his own insurance company and his own law practice. As an attorney, he helped represent Johnson C. Whittaker, a black cadet at West Point, in a high-profile, racially charged case, which he lost. Greener also served as secretary and chief fund-raiser for the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association and as secretary of the National Emigration Aid Society. He helped start a black Freemasons society and was elected the first black member of the American Philological Association as well. He did all of this while trying to make his mark as a writer and public speaker and while striving to be a good husband and father. Although successful at some of his endeavors, he always struggled financially, eventually lost his first wife and children, and seems to have come up just short of making it big as a public figure.

Through it all, Greener's "Off White" appearance and sophisticated mannerisms gave him advantages not shared by most of his dark-skinned peers, allowing him limited access to the social circles of some liberal white elites (chap. 10). His whiteness worked against him, however, as he sought validation from some of the main African American leaders of the day, such as Alexander Crummell and W. Calvin Chase. They believed wrongly that Greener had shunned his own people in an attempt to curry favor with whites and pass for white himself. In reality, some of the disdain stemmed from honest differences of political opinion, but it was exacerbated by Greener's penchant for self-promotion, which many interpreted as arrogance and snobbery. In the end, his off-whiteness affected every aspect of his life, as he was ultimately deemed "too white for blacks and too black for whites" (p. 163).