Richard Theodore Greener

Richard Theodore Greener (born January 30, 1844, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died May 15, 1922, Chicago, Illinois) was an attorney, educator, and diplomat who was the first African American graduate of Harvard University.

Greener was the son of seaman Richard Wesley and Mary Ann (le Brune) Greener. The family moved to Boston in 1853, and Richard’s father went to California during the Gold Rush to seek his fortune. Not long thereafter, letters and money stopped. At age 12 Richard quit school to help support himself and his mother. With the aid of one of his white employers, Greener was able to return to school, where he distinguished himself in his studies. He attended Phillips Academy and Oberlin College before matriculating at Harvard University (A.B., 1870).

In 1870–72 Greener taught at the Institute of Colored Youth in Philadelphia (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania). He also served for a year as principal of a high school in Washington, D.C., and worked as an editor and a law clerk during that period. In late 1873 Greener became a professor at the University of South Carolina (USC), during a short period of Reconstruction integration. He taught Latin, Greek, international law, and U.S. constitutional history during his four-year tenure there. Besides carrying out his teaching duties, Greener helped catalog and reorganize the school’s library. He also took classes in law, earning a law degree from USC in 1876. Soon after, he was admitted to the bar in South Carolina and in the District of Columbia. (Evidence of Greener’s presence at USC surfaced in 2009 when a trunk containing his papers, including his diploma from USC law school and his South Carolina law license, was found at a demolition site in Chicago.) In 1877–80 Greener was a law professor at Howard University, a historically black college, and he was made dean of the law school in 1879.

When a dearth of students caused the Howard law school to close the next year, Greener practiced law in Washington as a member of the firm of Greener & Cook. One of the cases that he became involved in was that of West Point cadet Johnson C. Whittaker, a youth Greener had sponsored, who in 1881 had been found beaten and tied to his bed in his room. Whittaker had been accused of causing those injuries to himself. Greener served as cocounsel during Whittaker’s ensuing court martial. Although Whittaker initially was found guilty, Greener requested a review of the verdict, with the result that Whittaker was readmitted to West Point. Ultimately, however, Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln ordered Whittaker discharged from West Point because he had failed an exam he had taken shortly after the attack.

Greener, who had met and befriended Ulysses S. Grant at Harvard, became very active in Republican politics. After Grant’s death in 1885, Greener was involved with the movement to provide an appropriate memorial for Grant. That ultimately led to the construction of Grant’s Tomb in New York City. From 1885 to 1893 Greener served as the first secretary of the Grant Monument Association, the organization that raised funds for the tomb.

In the 1896 presidential election (won by Republican William McKinley), Greener worked diligently with the Colored Bureau of the national Republican Party in Chicago, as he had in the past. As a result of his work for the party, Greener was appointed U.S. consul to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1898. He was transferred later that year to Vladivostok, Russia, where he remained until 1905. Thereafter he retired from the consular service and lived out the remainder of his life in Chicago, where he is buried. Belle da Costa Greene, J. Pierpont Morgan’s librarian and the first director of the Morgan Library, was one of Greener’s daughters (she was born Belle Marian Greener) by his first wife, Genevieve Ida Fleet.