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 Reconstructionintegration. 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.
Harvard University, oldest institution of higher learning in the United States (founded 1636) and one of the eight Ivy League schools, widely regarded for high academic standards, selectivity in admissions, and social prestige. The main university campus lies along the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few miles west of downtown Boston. Harvard’s total enrollment in the early 21st century is about 25,000. In April 2025 the university clashed with the administration of Pres. Donald Trump over government demands that Harvard implement key policy changes that, among other things, addressed accusations of antisemitism on campus and eliminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in admissions and hiring.
History
John HarvardA sculpture of John Harvard by Daniel Chester French in front of University Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Harvard’s history began when a college was established at Newtowne in 1636, which was later renamed Cambridge for the English alma mater of some of the leading colonists. Classes began in the summer of 1638 with one master in a single frame house and a “college yard.” In 1639 Harvard was named for its first benefactor, Puritan minister John Harvard, who left the college his books and half his estate.
U.S. presidents among Harvard alumni
John Adams
John Quincy Adams
Rutherford B. Hayes
Theodore Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
John F. Kennedy
George W. Bush
Barack Obama
At its inception Harvard was under church sponsorship, although it was not formally affiliated with any religious body. During its first two centuries the college was gradually liberated, first from clerical and later from political control, until in 1865 the university alumni began electing members of the governing board. During his long tenure as Harvard’s president (1869–1909), Charles W. Eliot made Harvard into an institution with national influence.
Harvard alumni include global political leaders such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former president of Liberia and the first woman to be elected head of state of an African country.
Fogg Art MuseumFogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Harvard’s undergraduate school, Harvard College, contains about one-third of the total student body. The core of the university’s teaching staff consists of the faculty of arts and sciences, which includes the graduate faculty of arts and sciences. The university has graduate or professional schools of medicine, law, business, divinity, education, government, dental medicine, design, and public health. The schools of law, medicine, and business are particularly prestigious. Among the advanced research institutions affiliated with Harvard are the Museum of Comparative Zoology (founded in 1859 by naturalist Louis Agassiz), the Gray Herbarium, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, the Arnold Arboretum, and the Fogg Art Museum. Also associated with the university are an astronomical observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts; the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., a center for Byzantine and pre-Columbian studies; and the Harvard-Yenching Institute in Cambridge for research on East and Southeast Asia. Many of these institutions are part of Harvard’s multi-library system, the oldest in the world.
Radcliffe College, one of the Seven Sisters schools that offered higher education to women at the time of founding, evolved from informal instruction offered to individual women or small groups of women by Harvard University faculty in the 1870s. In 1879 a faculty group called the Harvard Annex made a full course of study available to women, despite resistance to coeducation from the university’s administration. Following unsuccessful efforts to have women admitted directly to degree programs at Harvard, the Annex, which had incorporated as the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, chartered Radcliffe College in 1894. The college was named for the colonial philanthropist Ann Radcliffe, who established the first scholarship fund at Harvard in 1643.
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Until the 1960s Radcliffe operated as a coordinate college, drawing most of its instructors and other resources from Harvard. Radcliffe graduates, however, were not granted Harvard degrees until 1963. Diplomas from that time on were signed by the presidents of both Harvard and Radcliffe. Women undergraduates enrolled at Radcliffe were technically also enrolled at Harvard College, and instruction was coeducational.
Although its 1977 agreement with Harvard University called for the integration of select functions, Radcliffe College maintained a separate corporate identity for its property and endowments and continued to offer complementary educational and extracurricular programs for both undergraduate and graduate students, including career programs, a publishing course, and graduate-level workshops and seminars in women’s studies.
In 1999 Radcliffe and Harvard formally merged, and a new school, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, was established. The institute focuses on Radcliffe’s former fields of study and programs and also offers such new ones as non-degree educational programs and the study of women, gender, and society.
Harvard is known for its many sports teams and athletic events, as well as for its rivalry with Yale University that dates back to 1852 when they competed in an intercollegiate boat race, which Harvard won. In 1875 the universities played each other in a football match. Both events are now fixtures on the sporting calendars of the universities: Harvard and Yale face each other in an annual regatta and in a football match called “The Game.” Harvard alumni include Olympic medalists, such as ice hockey players Bill Cleary and Bob Cleary and figure skater Dick Button.
Harvard in the 21st century
Evolving leadership
In recent years Harvard University has made great progress in diversifying and promoting inclusiveness among its students and academic staff. In 2003 jurist Elena Kagan was appointed the first female dean of Harvard Law School. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust was the university’s first female president (appointed 2007), and Claudine Gay its first president of color (appointed 2023). Gay stepped down in 2024 after criticism of Harvard’s response to alleged antisemitism on campus following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and accusations of her having plagiarized her academic publications.
Higher education attacks during the second administration of Pres. Donald Trump
During the second term of Pres. Donald Trump, Harvard—as well as a number of other elite academic institutions—was threatened with funding cuts unless the university implemented key policy changes that, among other things, addressed accusations of antisemitism on campus and eliminated all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in admissions and hiring. In an April 14, 2025, letter titled “The Promise of American Higher Education,” Harvard Pres. Alan M. Garber agreed that the university had a “moral duty to fight antisemitism” and reported that efforts to do so were ongoing. However, he wrote, the demands of the Trump administration went far beyond combating antisemitism and included government regulation of “intellectual conditions,” a violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights. Garber rejected the government’s demands, declaring, “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” Hours after Garber’s decision, the Trump administration froze over $2 billion in previously awarded multiyear grants and contracts. The following day Pres. Trump called for Harvard to lose its tax-exempt status, and on April 16 Treasury Department officials asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate rescinding the university’s tax exemption.
Antagonism between Harvard and the Trump administration escalated in late May 2025 when the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard’s certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. The move effectively barred the university from enrolling foreign students—a group that represents more than a quarter of the student body. Harvard promptly sued, and a judge issued a temporary restraining order while the matter was reviewed. In response the administration suggested that Harvard’s remaining federal grants would be reallocated to trade schools or canceled altogether.
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