Background
Richard Theodore Greener was the son of Richard Wesley Greener and Mary Ann Le Brun. He was born on January 30, 1844 in Philadelphia, but moved to Boston when he was five years old.
(Excerpt from Charles Sumner, the Idealist, Statesman and ...)
Excerpt from Charles Sumner, the Idealist, Statesman and Scholar: An Address, Delivered on Public Day, June 29, 1874, at the Request of the Faculty of the University of South Carolina The opposition prophesied he would never return. The wish was father to the thought. But he did return and filled that empty chair with even more grace and intrepidity, with additional learning, intensified hostility, and an opposition so determined as to be destined to end only in the utter extermination of the cause. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Richard Theodore Greener was the son of Richard Wesley Greener and Mary Ann Le Brun. He was born on January 30, 1844 in Philadelphia, but moved to Boston when he was five years old.
Richard attended a grammar school in Cambridge, prepared for college at Oberlin, and Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard. He graduated in 1870.
He received two honorary Doctorates of Laws, one from Monrovia College in Liberia in 1882, and the other from Howard University in 1907.
At the age of twenty-six, he began his career as the principal of the male department of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. After remaining two years in this position, he served as a principal of the Summer High School of Washington, D. C. , for part of a year, then entered the office of the United States attorney for the District of Columbia. For a while in 1873 he was an associate editor of the New National Era of Washington, but in that year accepted the chair of mental and moral philosophy and logic in the University of South Carolina, which he held until 1877, when the Wade Hampton legislature closed the door of the institution to members of his race.
Greener assisted with the instruction in Latin, Greek, international law, and constitutional history of the United States, and in 1875 was university librarian. He also served on the commission to reconstruct the school system of the state, completed the law course of the University of South Carolina, and took an active part in politics, although he never sought election to any office. He was admitted to the bar in South Carolina in 1876 and in the District of Columbia the following year. In 1877 he became an instructor in the law department of Howard University, and dean in 1879.
In 1880 he gave up his deanship to become a law clerk in the office of the first comptroller of the United States Treasury, but served in this capacity only two years. In 1882 he settled down to practise law in the District of Columbia. Greener came into prominence as a leader of his race in 1879 when he took issue with Frederick Douglass, who was advising the restless freedmen in the South not to migrate to the West, but to remain where they were, that in their large numbers they might some day wield political power.
By 1884 he had become a prominent figure in politics, having participated in several national campaigns as a Republican. In 1885 he was appointed secretary of the Grant Memorial Association in the State of New York, and a few months later Mayor Grace of New York City appointed him chief examiner of the municipal civil-service board, which office he held until 1890. He later served as consul at Bombay, India, and in 1898 was appointed United States commercial agent at Vladivostok, Siberia.
He retired from foreign service in 1905, and thereafter made his home in Chicago until his death. Greener was a fluent speaker. He did not take rank with John M. Langston and Frederick Douglass, but there were few others of his race who could compete with him in forceful and logical presentation of facts. Fie published no extensive works, but his well-prepared lectures and addresses covered a wide range, embracing almost every aspect of local and national life as it influenced the status of the freedmen.
Greener was famous as the first black graduate of Harvard College and dean of the Howard University School of Law. Along with having accomplished many African-American firsts, Greener earned several awards in his lifetime. The University of South Carolina is honoring his legacy by erecting a statue of Greener.
(Excerpt from Charles Sumner, the Idealist, Statesman and ...)
Greener, insisting that migration would be a remedy for the disorders of the South, urged the freedmen to go West and take up fertile land. He considered it a promising sign, too, that the negro had learned to flee from persecution.
On September 24, 1874, he was married to Genevieve Ida Fleet, by whom he had seven children. Greener separated from his wife, although they never divorced. She and her daughters changed their name to "Greene" to disassociate themselves from him. Leaving his family, he took a Japanese common-law wife, Mishi Kawashima, with whom he had three children.
