Richard T Greener and the White Problem (episode 217)

Professor Richard T Greener grew up in Boston in the shadow of the abolition movement, graduated from Harvard, and became one of the foremost Black intellectuals of his era.  However, soon after publishing his most influential work, when it seemed like he would take up the mantle of Frederick Douglass, he instead sank into obscurity.  He was nearly forgotten for over a century, until his legacy was rediscovered in 2009 in a discarded steamer trunk in a dusty attic on the South Side of Chicago.


Richard T Greener and the White Problem

Boston Book Club


In 2017, Dr. Katherine Chaddock of the University of South Carolina, Greener’s old school, published the book Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard, the first book-length biography of Greener and our first Boston Book Club pick since October!  Her publisher says,

His black friends and colleagues often looked askance at the light-skinned Greener’s ease among whites and sometimes wrongfully accused him of trying to “pass.” While he was overseas on a diplomatic mission, Greener’s wife and five children stayed in New York City, changed their names, and vanished into white society. Greener never saw them again. At a time when Americans viewed themselves simply as either white or not, Greener lost not only his family but also his sense of clarity about race.

Richard Greener’s story demonstrates the human realities of racial politics throughout the fight for abolition, the struggle for equal rights, and the backslide into legal segregation. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock has written a long overdue narrative biography about a man, fascinating in his own right, who also exemplified America’s discomfiting perspectives on race and skin color. Uncompromising Activist is a lively tale that will interest anyone curious about the human elements of the equal rights struggle.

Upcoming Event

Everyone knows Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the bloody massacre on King Street that helped cement the Boston Massacre in American memory.  It’s easy to find copies of the engraving, and you can even see the original copper plate Revere etched to create the engraving from at the Commonwealth Museum in Dorchester.  But did you know that Paul Revere staged an elaborate visual spectacle to commemorate the first anniversary of the tragedy?  I’ve always imagined that in the days before television and movies, his Massacre illumination would have been transfixing.  Our friends at the Paul Revere House write,

The Paul Revere House is excited to present a commemorative reimagining marking the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Boston Massacre illuminations.

On March 5, 1771, Paul Revere used his recently purchased home to keep the memory of the Boston Massacre and opposition to the British occupation in Boston fresh with a series of three illuminations displayed in the windows facing North Square.  According to contemporary reports, thousands streamed by his house in silence to witness the spectacle which was a key link in the Revolutionary chain between the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.

Our virtual program offers footage of a local artist’s reimagining of the illuminations, descriptions from period newspaper accounts, and an in-depth panel discussion with Revere engraving expert, Prof. Nancy Siegel, and Boston Massacre scholar Prof. Serena Zabin to add context and color to this incredibly significant event.

There’s a $10 suggested donation with your registration, and the video will debut at 6:30pm on March 5, the 250th anniversary of the illumination and 251st anniversary of the Massacre. 

Transcript

Music

Jake:
[0:05] Welcome To Hub history, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston. The Hub of the universe.
This is episode 217, Richard Greener and the White Problem.
Hi, I’m Jake. Subscribers will know that I republished about a dozen classic episodes into the podcast feed over the past few weeks to celebrate Black History Month.
It is a little bit embarrassing, though, that none of the new episodes we released this month focused on black history. That’s why I’m releasing this episode today, February 28th, the last possible day of Black History Month.
This week I’ll talk about Professor Richard T. Greener, who grew up in Boston in the shadow of the abolition movement, graduated from Harvard and became one of the foremost black intellectuals of his era.
However, soon after publishing his most influential work when it seemed like he might take up the mantle of Frederick Douglass, he instead sank into obscurity.
He was nearly forgotten for over a century until his legacy was rediscovered in 2009 and a discarded steamer trunk in a dusty attic on Chicago’s south side.

[1:17] But before we talk about Professor Greener, I’d like to pause and thank our latest sponsors, Eliza Tea and Daniel D.
Thanks to loyal listeners like them, we can cover the cost of producing the show costs like Web hosting and security podcast, media hosting transcription services and file storage.
Listeners like Eliza choose to help Hub history on an ongoing basis by supporting us with $2.5 dollars or even $10 monthly on Patreon.
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[2:07] And now it’s time for this week’s main topic. At the turn of the 20th century, Americans of all political stripes were pondering what to do about what they called the Negro problem.
Starting after the Civil War, and especially with the end of reconstruction and the implementation of Jim Crow in the South, white Americans wondered what should be done about the millions of black Americans who were now no longer enslaved.
These new citizens tended to be impoverished, with little or no formal education and few job prospects beyond sharecropping and menial labor.

[2:43] For some white Americans, the answer was the creation of elaborate black codes in the South that criminalized African American life and returned tens of thousands of men who had previously been enslaved into servitude as prisoners.
For others, the answer was uplift. And a boom in college, founding from the 18 sixties to the 18 nineties created what are now recognized as historically black colleges and universities.

[3:10] For many white Americans, the new urgency of the so called Negro problem led to a brief resurgence of the colonization movement, which sought to use free black Americans to colonize territories in Africa.

[3:23] This movement has seen its heyday in the decades before the Civil War, when slave owners saw it as a convenient way to make sure that free blacks weren’t hanging around in America, educating those who are still enslaved and encouraging uprisings.
In the 18 forties, the American Colonization Society even founded the nation of Liberia on the west coast of Africa, with African Americans and a few whites establishing a settlement that became the city of Monrovia.

[3:50] No matter what they thought. The answer. Waas. Most American whites thought the so called Negro problem was upto whites to solve for all the way concern about that Negro problem in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The work with that name that’s most known today is a book of essays by black writers collected by Booker T. Washington in 19 oh three.
It features contributions by well known authors like T. Thomas Fortune and Charles Chestnut.
But at its heart, it’s a showcase of the disagreement between Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.
On the one hand, Washington argues for the sole focus on achieving economic gains through practical skills and his essay Industrial Education for the Negro.
On the other hand, Du Bois argues for the cultivation of a new generation of thinkers, teachers and leaders through classical education and has still controversial Essay The Talented 10th.

[4:48] The idea that black people were a problem was so cemented in the American mind that over a half century later, James Baldwin was still wrestling with it, writing What do people mean when they say the Negro problem?
I’ve never quite known what they meant.
There isn’t such a thing as a Negro. But there is such a thing as a boy or a man or a woman who may be brown or white or green or whatever.
But when you say the Negro problem, you create a great big monolith on beneath this wall or thousands of millions of human beings lives which are being destroyed because you want to deal with an abstraction.

[5:26] Whoever one American scholar turned this formulation on its head.
Writing in 18 94 possibly inspired by a recent partnership with Frederick Douglass, Professor RT. Greener published an essay titled The White Problem.
In the introduction, he argued that whatever the problem, waas African Americans were better off solving it on their own.
There was no Negro problem that it was upto whites to solve.
Instead, the white obsession with this question was itself the problem.

[5:58] A phase of the white problem is seen in the determination not only to treat.
The Negro is a member of a child like race, but the grim determination to keep him a child or award in every advance.
Since emancipation, it has, with true Caucasian gall, been assumed that everything must be done for him, and under no circumstances must he be allowed to do for himself in religion, in politics and civil and social life.
He must be developed in a pen staked off from the rest of mankind and nursed, coddled, fed and trained by eight of the longest spoons, forks and rakes obtainable all along.
There’s been heard, the solemn low refrain of doubt, small hope and feeble expectation as to the probable survival of this black infant.
Indeed, nothing is so weighed upon the average American Christian heart as the precarious health of this infant,
whom no one had the heart exactly to kill were it possible but whose noiseless and peaceful departure to a better world would have been hailed with smothered size of intense relief?

[7:02] You can see how Professor Greener is. The white problem helped lay the intellectual groundwork for later black scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter.
But he also leads some other more immediately practical groundwork for them, a swell when those scholars got their degrees from Harvard Do Boys with a PhD in 18 95 and Trotter with a Masters in 18 96.
It was during a brief era when an Ivy League education was relatively attainable for black scholars, at least for those who made up. What do Boys would later describe as that talented 10th?
That opportunity is directly attributable to Professor Greener Is Career of Harvard.
A generation before Richard Theodore Greener was born in Philly in 18 44 and experienced a surprisingly broad swath of the world is a young child,
as Alison Blakely described in an article on Greener in a 1974 issue of the Journal of Negro History.
Greener is paternal. Grandfather Jacob Greener was a well known Negro educator in Baltimore.
His father, Richard Wesley Greener, was a seaman who he once accompanied on a voyage to Liverpool.
His maternal grandfather was a Spaniard from the West Indies, which accounted for Greener is very light complexion.
Richard and his mother moved to Cambridge after his father disappeared when he was about nine years old, possibly to seek his fortune in the gold fields of California.

[8:28] For about two years, he attended the Broadway Grammar School at the southwest corner of Broadway and Windsor, where the Fletcher Maynard Academy stands today in a 2020 profile in the Harvard Crimson Sophia Liang rights.
Although he showed an early aptitude for literature in the classics of the Broadway grammar school, he left school at age 11 to support his family.
His odd jobs in Boston put him in the center of what he called the storm and stress of 18 55 to 62 when racial justice debates erupted throughout the city,
over the next few years, he worked in a shoe store, a wood engraving Shaw as a porter in a Tremont Street hotel with a fruit importer for a newspaper and finally as a porter for a Washington street jeweler.

[9:15] This was four or five years after the three attempts in Boston to Freeman, who’d been accused under the Fugitive Slave Act, one of which was successful,
the Vigilance Committee was still actively helping people who are in the process of escaping from slavery, find safe havens or find passage to Canada.
And it was around the time that the secret six began raising money to finance John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.
So Boston was full of excitement for a teenaged Greener.
Another profile, this one by Michael David Cohen for the African American Intellectual History Society, describes how he always managed to wind up in the middle of the action.
From the beginning, Greener developed the neck for meeting prominent Americans and for showing up on the field of racial action.
As a boy, he caught glimpses of Charles Sumner and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
At age 16, he helped protect Wendell Phillips from a mob in a Boston anti slavery meeting whose speakers also included Frederick Douglass.

[10:15] Despite the excitement, all Greener could think of was finding a way to further his education.
He worked for Augustus E. Batchelder, a silversmith by training who was a partner at the shop, Palmer and Batch Elders on Washington Street in Boston.
They advertised fancy goods like watches, jewelry, silver plated in Britannia, where as well as watchmakers and jewelers tools.
Richard Greener ran errands and made deliveries, and he eventually approached his boss with the proposal.
If Batchelder would provide the funds, Greener was willing to quote, do nothing else but study for the next 10 years of necessary.

[10:57] The boss agreed to put up the money, and another Bostonian who he ran errands for the secret six member Franklin Benjamin Sanborn helped Greener enroll in a prep school in Ohio, attached to Oberlin College.

[11:10] At Oh Berlin Greener experience what he called color phobia and felt that his education wasn’t progressing as well as it should.
Because of it, he decided to leave Oh, Berlin after the first year of his two year program, selecting first Phillips Exeter and then when they turned him down Phillips and over as a better fit to complete his Harvard preparatory program.
He entered and over as a senior but struggled to keep up is it dawned on him that his preparation at Oh Berlin, especially in math and science, had not measured up to his classmates.
Nevertheless, he was able to graduate with his class. And as the Crimson profile continues,
after Greener graduated from and over, Bachelor recommended him to Harvard President Thomas Hill as an experiment in the education of black students.
Hill, wishing to modernize the university, grated Greener a spot at the college and declared, I love the young man and admire his spirit.

[12:09] When Richard Greener entered. Harvard is a 21 year old freshman. In 18 65 only one other African American undergraduate had matriculated to the school.
Beverly Garnett Williams have been admitted as a member of the freshman class of 18 47 but he died just weeks before the school year began.
In 18 50 Daniel Lange, Junior Isaac, eight, Snowden and Martin Delanie were admitted to Harvard Medical School.
They all had experiences medical technicians or physician’s assistants, and they were all sponsored by the American Colonization Society, having pledged to immigrate to Liberia after their medical training.

[12:50] A month after they started their training, they got kicked out after white students complained that the admission of blacks to the medical lectures is highly detrimental to the interests and welfare of the institution of which were members,
and said they had no objection to the education and elevation of blacks but do decidedly remen straight against their presence in college with us.

[13:14] Before Greener stepped on to Harvard Yard, African Americans had only been welcome. On the campus is servants, toe white students and faculty.
At least two of the 17th century Harvard presidents enslaved black people to cook, clean and pick up after them.
As researcher Caitlin DeAngelis rights during the middle of the 18th century, every person in a position of authority at Harvard was a slave owner,
the president, the professors, the head tutor working for Harvard meant that they didn’t have to pay taxes on the people they enslaved.
It was subsidized slave ownership Harvard actively recruited in slavers. In both the 18th and 19th centuries, it been over backwards to accommodate the sons of Caribbean sugar planters and Southern plantation owners.
After Massachusetts outlawed slavery in the final decades of the 18th century, Harvard continued to benefit from slavery that took place elsewhere.
Families like the Royals and vassals who had beautiful estates in Cambridge sent their Children to Harvard, using the proceeds from their sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
With DeAngelis continuing in the 18th century, Harvard charged double tuition to the wealthy sons of sugar planters, some of them paid in literal casks of sugar.

[14:33] In return, those students were fellow commoners and were exempt from the rules of deference that govern the behavior of undergrads.
During the antebellum period, Harvard bent the rules for Southern students like Alfred More Red of Charleston.
His dad was a senator from South Carolina and owned the very pro secession Charleston Mercury.
In 18 50 Senator Rhett withdrew Alfred from Harvard because the anti fugitive Slave act protests quote, kept him excited and distracted from his studies.
Senator Red asked Harvard to give offered his degree anyway, even though he didn’t earn it. And they did.

[15:12] On the Harvard campus, Free African Americans worked as butlers, porters, cleaners and personal servants to students and faculty.
They are also enlisted to participate in deeply racist studies.
As biology professor Louis Agassiz attempted to prove that the different human races had actually evolved is completely different species.
They did not walk the halls of students, at least not until 18 65.

[15:38] As you might imagine, Richard T. Greener is presence on the campus led the wild speculation about what he was doing there.
In an essay he wrote around the time of his graduation, Greener described some of what he called the many false impressions about me, such as that I escaped from slavery with innumerable difficulties,
that I came direct from the cotton field to college, that I was a scout in the Union Army, the son of a rebel general, etcetera.

[16:07] During his freshman year, Greener excelled in language studies, earning Aly Prize for oratory.
However, its struggle with math and science continue.
At the end of the year, Harvard President Thomas Hill wrote to Greener sponsor Augustus Batchelder with unwelcome news.
His mathematical preparation was so utterly insufficient that he cannot possibly keep up with his class in that depart.
The faculty therefore strongly recommend him to withdraw from college and come back in September to join the next freshman class.

[16:41] In her Crimson profile, Sophie Liang Rights. Still determined to graduate, Greener worked with a private mathematics tutor, returned to college and found his second freshman year much more successful,
he wrote for the newly founded Harvard Advocate, joined the Pie at a society for literature and theater and became friends with the second black student in the freshman class.
He would go on to win first Baden Prize for a dissertation on Irish land tenure and graduate with honors in 18 70.

[17:13] Throughout his college years, Greener continued his knack of being in the right place at the right time to make acquaintances that would serve him well. In his later career, doctors Lady June Cole and Bruce K. Cole wrote in a 2018 biographical sketch.
Greener made significant contacts while at Harvard. His meeting of US Senator Charles Sumner, also a Harvard graduate, and President Ulysses S. Grant during their visits to campus proved fortuitous. To Greener is professional career.
In addition to his extracurricular activities, he developed relationships with students from the world’s most powerful families.
Moreover, his exposure to Boston’s old guard abolitionists and anti slavery leaders taught him to stand up for his rights.

[17:59] By the time he graduated, Richard Greener was proficient enough. It’s science and math to keep up with his class, but he excelled in languages, along with his award winning oratory in English, he also learned Latin and Greek.
He expressed a desire to study law, saying that his goal waas to get all the knowledge I can make all the reputation I can and do good and make a comfortable competences the corollaries of the other two.
To put it in today’s terms, he said that he wanted to do well by doing good as the doctors coal point out.
By graduating from Harvard in 18 70 Greener was leaving a sheltered world at a time when most black men did not enjoy the security and opportunities he had found. Access Thio at Harvard.
Greener learned the liberating feeling of meritocracy in that protected world.
He felt that the only limitation to a success was his own imagination and effort.
Having been shielded from the vagaries of the war during his preparatory studies at Oh, Berlin and Phillips and over Academy, he was unaware of the social transformation the nation was undergoing.

[19:09] 18 70 America was in the midst of reconstruction.
The U. S military occupied the states of the former Confederacy, which were forced to submit new state constitutions that provided civil rights for all citizens, including black citizens.

[19:25] This led to a brief period of unprecedented opportunity for black people in the South as they could vote and hold public office for the first time.
It also led to a period of unprecedented white terrorism and violence is the first generation of the Ku Klux Klan carried out murders and intimidation across the region.
As the first generation of the Ku Klux Klan carried out murders and intimidation across the region, white resentment of black political power in the South was often reflected with similar violence in the North.
Against this backdrop, Greener began a career in academia, lacking the funds to immediately attend law school. He took a job as a principal of a segregated school in Philadelphia from September 18 70 until December 18 72.
The job was open because his predecessor had been shot to death in a race riot.
The A I. H s profile notes. While teaching at Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth, now Cheyney University.
He continued to appear a momentous events on election day.
In 18 71 he saw white police officer shoot at an unarmed black man and then found a black colleague killed by a white political operative, sparking community outrage and resonating.
Today, the jury acquitted the operative, despite numerous eyewitness is testimony to the murder.

[20:52] After leaving that job, he took a job is the principal at Sumner High, another segregated school in Washington, D. C.
He only stayed there for about three months, leaving toe work for Frederick Douglass at the newspaper. The New National era.

[21:08] While Richard Greener was getting acquainted with Frederick Douglass, the state Legislature in South Carolina was dominated by radical Republicans, including former abolitionists and several black men.
Black men found their way into a number of state agencies and departments, and they even found a foothold in the University of South Carolina,
In October of 18 73 Richard Greener headed to the American South for the first time.
Accepting a position is professor of mental and moral philosophy at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.
The coals describe what this transition was like for him.
His experience is a professor at USC, including his active campaigning for civil rights in the state during Reconstruction shaped his views on social justice and the value of equal access to education.
At the start of reconstruction, the University of South Carolina was an experiment. Integrated education, its board of trustees, faculty and student body included members of both races.
Being at Seoul, African American Professor Greener was an important part of the experiment.
By educating black and white men at the university, Greener hoped to foster cooperation between the races and elevate the political and economic status of Friedman.

[22:26] Because the school was perennially underfunded and because of his innate abilities, Greener was given a broader set of responsibilities than a junior faculty member would have normally received in a more stable academic setting.
In addition to teaching mental and moral philosophy at the university, he taught Latin, Greek and math at the preparatory school,
and served a secretary of the faculty committee librarian, reorganizing a 27,000 volume collection cast into chaos during the Civil War,
financial aid officer and law school professor.
Also, during this period, he was appointed treasurer of the U. S C. Corporation and a member of the state commission to revise the state school system during his spare time.
Editor’s note. What spare time?
He pursued his dream of obtaining a law degree from the new USC law school, got married and had his first child.
However, in spite of or perhaps because of all the activities and responsibilities that competed for his time at the University of South Carolina as it Harvard Greener enjoyed a measure of equality that most members of his race would never experience.

[23:36] Because black Children in South Carolina had few opportunities to attend school. It all before the Civil War and not much had changed since one of Greener XKE innovations at the university was grooming incoming students.
At least it first, more students were enrolled at the college is prep school and in the new Greener invention, the sub freshman class.

[23:58] The first year, there are about 20 students at the university, including the sub freshman.
Because all the white students quit in protest, it soon became what the coals called a golden age of African Americans in higher education.
The second year, 115 students were enrolled, and things were looking up each year that the School ST Open there were more qualified students coming into the prep school, Mawr sub freshman and more qualified freshman at the university,
even Greener himself took advantage of the opportunities during this window.
He got his law degree from the newly opened law school at the University of South Carolina and was admitted to the bar in 18 76.
The following year, he was admitted to the bar in Washington, D. C. As well.
It looked like a bold new era of racial uplift and black self reliance was dawning in the South until former Confederate General Wade Hampton, the third, got himself elected governor.

[24:57] After a decade of vigilante violence and over terrorism by the cake, the red shirts and other white groups,
Hampton and his group of so called redeemers managed toe overturn the multiracial government of South Carolina and establish a new era of codified white supremacy.
Believing that it was completely impossible for whites and blacks to be educated together in the same classes, Hampton closed the University of South Carolina when it re opened, it was once again segregated.
This was, of course, a tragedy for black South Carolinians, but it was also a real kick in the teeth for Professor Rt Greener, the Coals wrote when he left to take his position at the University of South Carolina.
Great Heart hoped that an innate sense of justice would eventually put an end to senseless prejudice in the U. S.
However, the end of reconstruction brought with it an end to the circumstances that have contributed to Greener success.
As the federal government pulled back troops in the South from enforcing civil rights for blacks, Greener struggled to make a place for himself in public life.
He concluded that African Americans had hoped in vain for change and that only agitation would obtain justice.

[26:16] As Cohen’s A. I. H s profile lays out Greener is next. Few years were a time of transition from academia toe activism.
Having earned his law degree while teaching, he joined a Washington D.
C practice and became dean of the Howard University law Department in 18 81.
He used this legal credentials to help defend a black U. S military academy cadet accused of faking an attack by weight classmates accused of faking an attack by weight classmates.
Greener lost the case but earned a national reputation. Greener became a prominent scholar of race.

[26:56] It was around this time that Greener reconnected with Frederick Douglass working both alongside and against the older man.
At the time, Greener was moving away from the Republican Party as not being supportive enough of African American rights. Is reconstruction crumble?
While Douglass continued to support the party that had fought alongside him to end slavery much later, Greener recalled what would have been like to grow up in the shadow of Frederick Douglass in Boston.

[27:26] As a Boston boy, I well recall my first sight of Mr Douglass in the late fifties.
It was in the old melody in on Washington Street, where the anti slavery conventions and women’s rights conventions were want to be held.
I’ve been accustomed to read Frederic Douglass Paper, The North Star, but was too young to have formed any clear notion about his personality through the kindness of my mentor and early friend William C.
Nel, whose statue of addicts, his life stream is at last Thank God erected,
I was privileged to go to the rear of the stage entrance and there for the first time, saw in one group Douglass Garrison, Abby Kelly, Foster Purvis,
Sojourner Truth, Phillips, Pillsbury and William Wells Brown’s.

[28:12] There was a clash of opinion, All I had Present Recall and Sojourner Truth.
Slender, black weird CRS in speech and manner.
Sibyl, indeed, a fit foil to Douglass was opposed, But it was the fencing of the representatives man and woman of the black race.
Afterward, at the annual bazaars at the 12th Baptist Church, where he lectured and on the first anniversary of the hang of John Brown when a Boston mayor tried to put down free speech,
an occasion dwindle, Phillips finest effort, mobs and education.
I had an opportunity to see, to know, to enjoy his personal friendship and reverently studied the manifold phases of his unique character in a Siris of formal debates in the early 18 eighties.
Greener would argue that the nation’s new class of Friedman should move to the Western territories, where the existing structures of white supremacy would have less power over them, while Douglass argued that they should work within America’s political system to institute creator civil rights protection.

[29:16] When Greener would succinctly and eloquently sum up the failures of reconstruction. During these debates, his older foe would join the audience in applauding him.

[29:26] In 18 83 they took their show on the road, organizing a national convention of Colored Men in Lexington, Kentucky, where Douglass continued to insist that black men deserved a place at the table.
That this denial of rights to us is because of our color on Leah’s color is a badge of condition is a manifest in the fact that no matter how decently dressed or well behaved a colored man, maybe,
he has denied civil treatment in the ways thus pointed out, unless he comes as a servant,
his color, not his character, determines the place he shall hold and the kind of treatment he shall receive.
That this is due to a prejudice and has no rational principle under it is seen in the fact that the presence of colored persons and hotels and railcars is only offensive.
When there there’s guests and passengers as servants, they’re welcome, but as equal citizens they are not.
It’s also seen in the further fact that nowhere else on the globe, except in the United States are colored people subject to insult and outrage on account of color.
The colored traveler in Europe does not meet it, and we denounce it here as a disgrace to American civilization and American religion and is a violation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution of the United States.

[30:44] Through his dialogue and sometimes tense partnership with Frederick Douglass, Richard Greener built a national reputation, though is mostly remembered today is the first black Harvard graduate in his own time.
Greener moved in the circles of the African American intellectual elite.
He was considered one of the leading race men of the late 19th century.
His partnership with Douglass continued the next year. His partnership with Douglass continued in 18 84 when the two men were among 10 authors who contributed essays on the topic.
The Future of the Negro for the North American Review.

[31:21] The contribution by Douglass was fatalistic, seeing few options open to the black masses but to and Douglass words adjust himself to American civilization in the face of history.
I do not deny that a darker future than I have indicated may await the black man contact of weak races with strong has not always been beneficent.
The week have been oppressed, persecuted, driven out and destroyed.
The Hebrews in Egypt, the Moors in Spain, the Caribs in the West Indies, the Picts in Scotland, the Indians and Chinese in our own country show what may happen to the Negro.
But happily, he has a moral and political hold upon this country deep in firm one, which in some measure destroys the analogy between him and other week peoples and classes.
His religion and civilization are in harmony with those of the people among whom he lives.
He worships with them in common temple and a common alter.
And to drag him away is to destroy the temple and tear down the altar, drive out the Negro, and he drive out Christ the Bible and American liberty with him.

[32:34] Greener, on the other hand, saw promise again in migration, but by this time he was less enthused about immigration to the Midwest and West.
Instead, he was more focused on circulation in and out of the Southern states, which other authors in that pre great migration collection identified as the natural and perhaps perpetual home of African Americans.
Greener began, the Negro will migrate Justus he has for 50 years.
Though not impelled by the same causes.
The nucleus of the Negro population of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City in Boston came originally from Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Louisiana.
They came by reason of Manu Mission by flight, or remained when they’re to confiding masters brought them up on northern soil.
Since the war, there’s been a constant ebb and flow of this interstate migration, and in many instances it is completely over slowed. The more stable pre war population of the city’s mentioned.
The stream has penetrated far to the west and northwest, where many have gone, and where they received higher wages than they did at the south.

[33:48] On the other hand, at the close of the rebellion, many of the younger men born in the North went south, generally settling in the States from which their fathers and migrated.
They took an active part in reconstruction politics of those born at the South.
Prior to the war, a large number of followed union officers home gained educational advantages, a knowledge of men and affairs and have since returned as teachers and businessman.

[34:15] Hitherto, migration has followed the natural law and seemed confined to the younger men.
Now the impulse effects those of mature age and the South seems as it should be, their natural goal, perhaps presaging Marcus Garvey’s views on black nationalism.
A half century later, Greener foresaw an era when African Americans would return to their ancestral continent.
Not, however, forced onto ships by a colonization society in order to rid the U. S of its so called Negro problem.
But instead as an expansion of their already growing political and economic power from the United States, the stream of civilization will inevitably lead to Africa.
The rich table lands east of Liberia will be occupied. First, we may look for many radiating currents there, from it would be poetic justice to see a Negro American civilization redeeming Africa.
The antipathy formerly felt by the Negro American to colonization has passed away.
He now sees quite clearly that to civilize Africa is to exalt the Negro race.

[35:26] Throughout. He stresses the importance of education and self reliance with his essay closing.
The most hopeful sign for the Negro today is his indisposition to be carried and cared for.
He aspires toe own his house, manage his own plantation, conduct his own business, teach his own school.
It is not his fault that he can’t rid himself of the professed philanthropist and the professed politician.
They will insist, despite the Negroes protest upon praying, thinking, preaching, voting and caring for him.

[36:03] About a decade later, after Greener and Douglass had drifted apart, they would each revisit the subject of the so called Negro problem, which still dominated public discourse.
This was a pivotal time coming at the last years of Douglass. His life and Greener is treatment of the problem set him up as a logical heir to Douglass is thrown.
Greener, however, would end up taking a very different career path.

[36:30] In 18 93 Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, turning almost 700 lakefront acres into a gleaming new great White City.

[36:41] Frederick Douglass pointed out that the nickname was appropriate because of more than just a fresh coat of white paint.
The project’s leadership was exclusively white. The workforce they hired was nearly all white and black. Americans were restricted to visiting the exposition only on a single designated colored day.
Ida B. Wells led a boycott of the fair, while Frederick Douglass was appointed as a representative of the Nation of Haiti in their pavilion, ensuring that he had official access to the fair and giving them a base from which to deliver a number of lectures and operations.
During one of these speeches, a heckler interrupted him and asked what America should do about its Negro problem.
Douglass put away his prepared remarks and replied, We hear nowadays of a frightful problem called a Negro problem.
What is this problem? As usual, the North is humbug, the Negro Problems, a southern device to mislead and deceive.
There is, in fact, no such problem.
The real problem has been given a false name. It is called Negro for a purpose.
It has substituted Negro for nation because the one is despised and hated and the other is loved and honored.
The true problem is a national problem.

[38:01] It has been affirmed on the one hand and denied on the other that the Negro since emancipation has made commendable progress.
I affirm that no people emancipated under the same conditions could have made Mawr commendable progress than has the Negro in the same length of time,
under the whole heavens, there never was an enslaved people emancipated under more unfavorable circumstances or started from a lower condition in life.

[38:27] Alluding to the rush to mend the bonds between white northerners and white Southerners that led both sides to abandon the experiment of reconstruction, he continued, We fought for your country.
We ask that we be treated as well as those who fought against your country.
We love your country. We ask that you treat us as well as you do Those who love but a part of it.
Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem.
The problem is whether the American people have honesty. Enough loyalty, enough honor enough or patriotism enough toe live up to their own constitution.
Maybe Professor Rt. Greener read a transcript of Douglass remarks and got inspired.
Or maybe he just felt that he needed to take on the racial question one more time before embarking on a new chapter in his career.
But either way, his essay was published the following year in 18 94.
I’m honestly not sure what magazine first carried it. When I searched for a copy, I kept finding excerpts and partial reprints in different newspapers around the country.
The first complete copy I came up with was from the Journal of Edward Everett Hale’s Linda Hand Society, an organization that still exists in Boston.

[39:45] As we heard earlier, the central theme was that there was no Negro problem that required white benefactors to drag a benighted race up from slavery.
Instead, there was a white problem with the dominant culture, refusing to recognize the degree to which black Americans had taken an active role in creating the abolition movement,
fighting for freedom in the civil war and then building economic and political power in the post war years.
Another difficulty of this white problem is the universal belief that somehow the Negro race began its career with President Lincoln’s proclamation.
All such novices would do well to look up their old histories, newspapers and pamphlets.
He was the agricultural laborer and the artisan of the South, the trusted servant in companion at the North.
He took part in all mechanical pursuits, helped build the houses, worked on the first newspapers, made the first woodcuts and was the best press hman at Charleston, Philadelphia in Boston.
In every industrial, social and political movement, as well as in the different warlike struggles, he is born an honorable part, wish to profess ignorance of is not creditable or, if denied, shows willful prejudice.

[41:00] He was on the Heights of Abraham with Wolf and the French and Indian Wars with Brad IQ, the first martyr of the revolution is seen in troubles. Picture retreating with the Patriots from Bunker Hill.
Musket in hand, Washington did not disdain to share a blanket with him on the cold ground at Valley Forge at the South, with Marion and Green at the North with Washington and Gates with Wayne and Alan.
It is time it should be clearly emphatically and proudly stated that instead of being a popper pariah class, as is supposed, there was no movement looking to the amelioration of their condition from 18 oh eight until John Brown’s raid in 18 59.
Nothing, which tended toe. Unshackle the slave or removed the clogs from the free colored man in which he was not the foremost active, intelligent participant, never a supplicant, never a mere recipient.
On the contrary, he was the first to organize for his own emancipation, among the first to speak and write and print on his own behalf.

[42:01] One section sites the early leadership of black Bostonians in the abolition movement, eventually dragging the white abolitionists who we remember today, how long in their Wake.

[42:11] Mr Howells looks up the streets of Inward Hill, referring to Beacon Hill and sees only a few straggling Negroes.
They’re of no interest and, of course, have no story. Bless you to tell.
And yet there are many stories, many traditions, much history clustering about that hill from Cambridge Street to the common from Charles Toe Hancock.
Big Dick, the boxer precursor of Jackson. The blind preacher. Raymond Prince Hall in Eastern Master Paul in his church in school in which the first American anti slavery Society was organized.
January 6th, 18 32.
It was in Master Paul’s Church on Belknap Street that the abolitionists, driven from Tremont Temple in 18 60 found refuge and preserved their free speech for Boston and for America.
If David Walker’s appeal, issued in 18 28 had been printed in 17, 65 or 70 and had been about the rights of the colonies, it would long since have attracted attention.
But it was written by one of the old cloth merchants of Brattle Street and Extinct Guild, and is the voice of a black John the Baptist. Crying in the wilderness.
It attained the honor of legislative attention and a reward set for the author’s head, but it is an American classic and forever answers all hints it Negro contentment under oppression.

[43:37] After tallying up centuries of black accomplishment and putting next to it in the ledger, the many barriers still thrown up in front of African Americans because of their race, Greener concluded.
If character, reputation, manly accomplishments, the heights reached the Palm one still find any black hero a marked man because of no fault of his own,
and church and society home and club united and thus Oster sizing him and his Children,
then, is it not demonstrated that it is not the black but the white problem, which needs the most serious attention in this country?

[44:14] It’s a career defining polemic, and it propelled Greener to the apex of black intellectualism.
Just months before Frederick Douglass died, Richard Greener was perfectly positioned to take up that great man’s mantle upon his departure from the stage.
So why is he simply remembered as the first black graduate of Harvard and not as a thought leader and racial uplift at the turn of the 20th century? Alongside two boys and trotter?

[44:40] Almost a soon as the white problem was published, Greener began pursuing a career in the foreign Service prior to the administration of Woodrow Wilson, service of the Federal government was legally and technically desegregated,
and a modest number of black men were able to make careers for themselves in the post office, Treasury Department and even the State Department.

[45:03] After years of rejection, Greener was finally appointed to a post in Mumbai, India, in early 18 98 but his posting was delayed because of a local outbreak of the plague.
Later that year, he was appointed to a new position. Is the first U. S. Consul of Vladivostok, Russia.
There was just one tiny problem as recognizing the introduction to a volume of his dispatches from Vladivostok held by the U. S. Archives on May 25th, 18 98.
Richard T. Greener is appointment is consular. Vladivostok was confirmed, but when he arrived at the post, the Russian authorities refused to accept his executor.
On July 21st, 18 98 greeters appointment was changed to that of commercial agent. That position, which the Russians accepted.

[45:52] The Russians didn’t want a black console, so Greener had to accept a lesser title.
Nonetheless, he would remain in Russia for the next eight years, losing touch with his wife of 14 years and six Children back in the U. S.
And taking a Japanese Russian woman as his common law wife, with whom he would have three more Children.

[46:13] You could play a small part in the negotiations ending the Russo Japanese War, and he earned a medal from the Qing Dynasty in China for helping to provide famine relief during the boxer war.
During his years in Russia, he kept writing. But now he was less focused on racial uplift and mawr on the Siberian for trade, flower production in Manchuria, the public water supply in Vladivostok,
Russian tariffs and olio margarine and anything else that might be of interest to an American company trying to get a foothold in Siberia.

[46:45] After he returned to the U. S. And 19 oh six, Richard Greener lost touch with both his wives and all nine of his Children.
He lived with extended relatives in Chicago, supporting himself through legal work and an occasional lecture. Siri’s professor, Richard Theodore Greener, died in 1922 at the age of 78.
Already wallowing in obscurity some 30 years after the peak of his fame is a race man that might have been the last we heard about Professor RT. Greener.
If members of a demolition crew hadn’t checked inside the old trunk they found in the attic of the abandoned house they were tearing down on Chicago’s South Side In 2000 and nine, an article in The Chicago Sun Times describes what they discovered.

[47:33] It wasn’t much more than a ghost house. By the time Rufus McDonald got the call, the front door of the abandoned home near 75th in Sand Amman, was unlocked and swinging in the wind.
Drug addicts, squatters and stray animals carried away whatever they wanted.
Everything that wasn’t termite infested seemed to have been stolen. Even the copper pipes were gone,
but the scavengers missed something incredible hidden in the attic that McDonald was contacted to clear before the homes 2009 demolition was a trunk.
Inside were the papers of Richard T. Greener, the first African American to graduate from Harvard.
I didn’t know who he waas, said MacDonald, But as soon as I found out, I knew it was a story that had to be told.

[48:22] Historians thought the documents were lost in the 19 oh six San Francisco earthquake because Greener had passed through at the time,
they were astonished to learn in the past week that Greener 18 70 Harvard diploma water damage but intact,
his law license photos and papers connected to his diplomatic role in Russia and his friendship with President Ulysses S. Grant have survived.

[48:46] It gives me goose flesh, said Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Who leads Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African American research.
Greener was a leading intellectual of his time. It’s a remarkable discovery.
His graduation blazed a trail for black Harvard intellectuals, including Gates, his friend, President Barack Obama, the professor added.
He was the voice before Du Bois and the president’s predecessor.

[49:17] Rufus MacDonald held onto the papers for about three years before making the discovery public.
He’s faced intense criticism from academics for supposedly holding the papers hostage, even threatening to burn them.
At one point, after Harvard offered him what he considered an insultingly low, some for a few documents he broke the collection up and slowly sold it off to the highest bidder.
I’m no expert in rare books, but it looks like the most recent sales of Greener Is Papers ended around 2016 as more primary sources about Richard Greener have gone into libraries and archives.
Thanks in part to McDonald, it’s opened up his life to scholars, including Dr Catherine Chat IQ of the University of South Carolina. Greener is old school.
In 2017, she published uncompromising activist Richard Greener, first black graduate of Harvard, the first book length biography of Greener and our first Boston Book Club pick since October.

[50:20] Her publishers description says his black friends and colleagues often looked a scant that the light skinned, Greener ease among whites and sometimes wrongfully accused him of trying toe pass,
and sometimes wrongfully accused him of trying to pass,
while he was overseas.
On a diplomatic mission. Greener is wife and five Children. Stayed in New York City, changed their names and vanished into white society.
Greener never saw them again.

[50:49] At a time when Americans viewed themselves simply. Is either white or not Greener lost not only his family but also a sense of clarity about race.
Richard Greener story demonstrates the human realities of racial politics throughout the fight for abolition, the struggle for equal rights and the backslide into legal segregation.
Catherine Reynolds Chat IQ has written a long overdue narrative biography about a man fascinating in his own right who also exemplified Americans. Discomforting perspectives on race and skin color.
Uncompromising Activist is a lively tale that will interest anyone curious about the human elements of the equal rights struggle.

[51:32] And as long as we’re resurrecting the Boston Book Club for a week, I might as well bring back the upcoming historical event as well.
Everyone knows Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the bloody massacre on King Street that helped cement the Boston massacre in American memory.
But did you know that Revere staged an elaborate visual spectacle to commemorate the first anniversary of the tragedy?
Our Friends at the Paul Revere House, right?
The Paul Revere House is excited to present a commemorative reimagining marking the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Boston Massacre Illuminations on March 5th, 17 71.
Paul Revere used us recently purchased home to keep the memory of the Boston massacre and opposition to the British occupation in Boston, fresh with a Siris of three illuminations displayed in the windows facing North Square,
according to contemporary reports, thousands stream by his house in silence toe witness.
The spectacle, which was a key link in the revolutionary chain between the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party,
are virtual program offers footage of a local artists, reimagining of the illuminations, descriptions from period newspaper accounts and an in depth panel discussion with Revere Engraving expert Professor Nancy Segal,
and Boston Massacre scholar professor Serena Zaben toe add context in color to this incredibly significant event.

[52:58] Have the link you need to register for the virtual event in this week’s show notes.
There’s a $10 suggested donation, and the video debuts at 6:30 p.m. On March 5th, the 250th anniversary of the illumination and 251st anniversary of the massacre.
On a personal note, I’m pretty excited to see the presentation. It’s easy to find Revere’s engraving.
I’ve even seen the original copper plate attached to create it at the Commonwealth Museum.
However, I’ve always imagined that in the world before movies and TV, the illuminations must have been transfixing.

[53:35] Toe. Learn more about Professor Richard T. Greener and his treatment of the white problem.
Check out the show notes this week at hub history dot com slash 217 I’ll have pictures of Greener links to his dispatches from Vladivostok and a copy of the White Problem.
I’ll link to all the sources I quoted from in the show, and I’ll include links to the works he created in collaboration and competition with Frederick Douglass as well as Greener is personal recollections of Douglass after his passing.
And, of course, we’ll have links to information about our upcoming event and uncompromising activist, this week’s Boston Book Club pick.
If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email us at podcast of hub history dot com.
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Music

Jake:
[54:46] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.