New Alain Locke Biography + Richard T. Greener Honored at University of South Carolina

When most people think of the Harlem Renaissance, they probably summon the names of its major literary and visual atists--Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Aaron Douglas, etc.--and even may note figures who were linked to but critical of some of its aspects, like W. E. B. DuBois. They also may recall the cultural shift under which it unfolded, "The New Negro Movement." But they may not know the name of the man who popularized the term "The New Negro," in a famous essay and in, perhaps most lastingly, in the title of his 1925 famous anthology, and who provided the intellectual foundation, and cultivated the networks out of which the Harlem Renaissance developed.

That man was Alain Leroy Locke (1885-1954), a Philadelphia native who attended Harvard College (AB 1907), became the first African American Rhodes Scholar, studied at the University of Berlin, and subsequently returned to Harvard to receive his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1918. Black, gay, physically unimposing, an adherent of the Bahá'í faith, and a gifted and productive thinker and writer, Locke not only provided the intellectual framework for the New Negro Movement and the Harlem Renaissance, through his championing of Black art and culture, and the idea of the Diaspora and its links to Africa, but he taught at Howard University from 1918 to 1925, when he was temporarily dismissed for teaching a course on race relations, and then, after reinstatement in 1928, until 1953, training generations of students, including Toni Morrison.

Jeffrey C. Stewart, a professor in the Department of Black Studies at University of California-Santa Barbara has just published a new, thorough biography of Locke, a scholar, critic, and cultural worker, situating him with the intellectual, social, political, and cultural contexts in which he lived. Titled The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford University Press, 2018), Stewart's study draws upon previously unavailable primary source material and interviews with Locke's colleagues, friends and associates. Divided into three sections, the first focusing on Locke's youth and eduction, the second on Locke's involvement with the Harlem Renaissance and his advancement of ideas of Black beauty and aesthetics, and the third exploring the latter portion of Locke's rich and fascinating life, Stewart's exploration of Locke's life and mind looks like it also will provide a richer illumination of the intellectual foundations of and complex relationships among members of the Harlem Renaissance and its many cultural legacies.

I have ordered a copy of Stewart's biography, which has received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist and a laudatory review in The New York Times, and am looking forward to reading it. (If I can, I may post a review on here.) I especially enjoyed listening to Professor Stewart discuss it on Midday in New York; you can hear that podcast here. You can also read Eugene Holley's excellent overview of Stewart's book on Publishers Weekly's website. Stewart's previous work includes several edited volumes about Locke, as well as the biography Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen and 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About African American History, a text that, like the Locke biography, strikes me as particularly appropriate for our current moment.

***

The unveiling of the Richard T. Greener
statue, University of South Carolina
(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

Nearly half a century before Alain Locke graduated from Harvard, the first African American to enroll and successful receive a Harvard College degree left his name on the university's rolls, and proceeded to a remarkable life that, like Locke's, is now almost completely forgotten. Richard T. Greener, whom I'd previously blogged about when a contractor discovered a trunk of his belongings in a run-down Chicago home, was that first graduate (A.B. 1870), and, as part of his extraordinary journey, received a law degree from the University of South Carolina in 1876, during that brief period of post-Civil War Reconstruction, which meant a brief interlude of integration. From 1873 to 1877, Greener served as a professor at South Carolina, becoming the first African American professor there, and, once Reconstruction ended and white retrenchment and segregation resumed their hold, he moved to Howard University, where he would serve as the dean of the law school, before eventually entering government service as an agent in Vladivostok, Russia.

Democratic Congressman James Clyburn, at the unveiling
(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

Yesterday, the University of South Carolina unveiled a 9-foot tall statue honoring Greener as one its pioneering figures. Speakers, including Democratic Congressman and Minority Whip James Clyburn, praised his numerous contributions during his brief stay at the university, which included serving as professor of philosophy, while also teaching the classics, mathematics, and constitutional history and serving as USC's first librarian. The statue, by Jon Hair, stands next to the Thomas Cooper Library, which he led. While teaching Greener simultaneously enrolled in South Carolina's law school, graduating with honors, and was admitted to South Carolina's bar in 1876 and the DC bar in 1877. An advocate for racial equality, journalist, and secondary school educator as well, Greener later moved to DC, beginning his career at Howard in 1879, where he taught until 1881.

Evelyn Bausman, a grand-daughter
of Richard T. Greener, poses with
a statue of Greener that was
unveiled at The University of South Carolina.(TheState.com © Tracy Glantz tglantz@thestate.com)

He would go on to open his own law practice, and later, after serving as US Consul to Bombay, India, became the first black US diplomat to a predominantly white country and the first American to hold his Russian post. Throughout, Greener kept writing and advocating on behalf of African Americans; ironically, his daughter, Belle da Costa Greene, would pass as a white woman in New York, and gained the confidence of and great influence with banker J. P. Morgan, becoming his chief manuscript advisor and eventually the first director of the Morgan Library. At a time when US municipalities, public and private institutions, and corporations are rethinking monuments to problematic historical figures and eras, like the Confederacy, the USC unveiling offers and enshrines a powerful and necessary counternarrative.

Richard T. Greener
(photo courtesy of Harvard
University Library)

In 2001, while celebrating its centenary, USC commissioned and staged a play, The White Problem, by Jon Tuttle, about Greener's time on campus. Then in 2013, the centenary of Greener's arrival at South Carolina, the university honored him by reintroducing him to the campus, complete with a ceremony (see below) on his behalf. Among the events to celebrate him, there was an official presentation of his law diploma and law license, which USC purchased from the Chicago trove. As for his first alma mater, Harvard installed a portrait of Greener in   its Annenberg Hall, located in its famous Memorial Hall (opened the year of Greener's graduation). In addition, the Cambridge Historical Commission mounted a plaque commemorating him on College House, in Harvard Square, at 1430 Massachusetts Avenue. You can learn more about Greener's life in Katherine Reynolds Chaddock's biography Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College (Johns Hopkins, 2017).

Remarkable Trove Found in Chicago: Richard T. Greener

Richard Theodore Greener, A.B. 1870, Harvard College,
LL.B. 1876, University of South Carolina
(courtesy of Harvard University Library)

It was, at least from the outside, just another abandoned house on the South Side of Chicago, at 75th and Sangamon.  According to Kim Janssen's article in the Chicago Sun-Times, squatters, drug addicts, and stray animals had reduced it mostly to a shell, its front door flapping open like a tribute to desolation. Rufus McDonald, one of the workers hired to raze the house, made a remarkable discovery in its attic. There he found a steamer trunk full of papers, including what appeared to be--and was--a Harvard College diploma from 1870. While this would not be unheard of--Chicago has long had among its residents graduates of Harvard, and the neighborhood, Englewood, was once part of the very vibrant southern part of the post-fire 19th and early 20th century metropolis. McDonald went through the papers and noticed other documents that caught his eye: a law licence from South Carolina; a photograph of a man who appeared to be mixed-race or black; and an 1853 or 1854 book entitled Autographs for Freedom, a publication of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.

Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922)
University of South Carolina

McDonald had the presence of mind to collect all the papers and put them in a brown paper bag, despite being told by his crew to trash them, and took them to book expert on the northside of Chicago. The expert reviewed the documents and let McDonald know about his find: they had originally belonged to Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922), the first African-American graduate of Harvard College (and the second black person to have been admitted to the college).  Not only that, but Greener was a major intellectual and public figure of his day, despite the constraints racism imposed upon him. He became the first, and the for decades the only, black professor (of philosophy) at the University of South Carolina, during the brief window Reconstruction provided (1873-1877), and was admitted to the bar in that state in 1876; he became a dean of Howard University's School of Law in 1879; he helped to elect several Republican presidents and successfully pushed that party to condemn lynching; he was served in the foreign service in Russia in 1898, and later in China.

Richard T. Greener
(courtesy Harvard University Library)

Who was this extraordinary person, Theodore Greener, almost completely unknown by anyone today, though he is, I must note, not infrequently invoked by Harvard? Historian Michael Mounter wrote his doctoral thesis on Greener and has uncovered a good deal about his life. He was born the grandson of a slave in Philadelphia, and his father was a mariner; his uncle, in whose orbit he spent a great deal of time, was a prosperous barber and politically active in the civic affairs of that city.  When he was 10 the family moved to Boston, where he was barred from attending the public schools because of his race, so his mother enrolled him in a private school, from which he later had to withdraw when his father never returned from the Gold Rush in California. He began working as a porter at the age of 14, and it was two Boston businessmen, George Herbert Palmer and Augustus Batchelder, who funded Greener's education at Oberlin College's preparatory school from 1862-1864 (during the US Civil War, no less), and then at Phillips Academy from 1864-65, before Batchelder arranged for his admission, as an experimental, to the college, where he was an academic standout.

Richard T. Greener

Several of Harvard's other schools had already admitted and graduated black students: Harvard Medical School in 1850 had admitted three students, including author and anti-slavery activist Martin Delany, before rescinding the offers after pressure from white students; in 1869 Harvard Law School graduated its first African American, George Lewis Ruffin, who in 1883 became Massachusetts' first black judge; and that same year, Harvard Dental School graduated a black student, Robert Tanner Freeman. (The following year, George Franklin Grant would graduated with a dental degree, before going on to invent the golf tee.)

McDonald holding a copy of Greener's
diploma from the University of South Carolina
(Cheryl Corley/NPR)

Indeed, a tiny number of African Americans had previously received undergraduate and graduate from institutions ranging from Oberlin College to Brown University to Middlebury College, during a period when the majority of black people were forbidden, sometimes at penalty of death, from learning to read or write, and the majority were enslaved. After Greener's graduation, Harvard would admit a few more African Americans to its various schools through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, though they remained a tiny but often publicly noteworthy minority until the 1970s. Among the most famous 19th century graduates after Greener include W. E. B. DuBois (AB 1890, AM 1891, PhD 1895, becoming the first African American earn a doctorate in the United States); his classmate Clement G. Morgan (AB 1890, LLB 1893, the first person to hold both degrees from Harvard, and the first black Senior Class Orator); and the anti-racist and peace activist William Monroe Trotter (AB 1895, AM 1896).

McDonald holding one of the photographs
he found, of Richard T. Greener
(Cheryl Corley/NPR)

But back to McDonald: He not only refused any money from the appraiser for the documents, but went back to the Englewood residence to fetch the trunk. It, like the house, was already gone. He retains the rights to the documents, and is considering where they might go. Interested parties include Harvard itself; the Sun-Times report quotes Harvard professor and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for many years head of its African and African American Studies Department, as having expressed interest, though he has told McDonald not to expect a mint in return. Other possible places the papers might go would include the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection at Howard University; the Library of Congress; or other notable research collections around the country. Perhaps someone will donate the papers to the forthcoming Museum of African American History in Washington. Whatever the case, it is likely a private collector will snap them up and donate them to one of these institutions. They will be invaluable for historians, scholars, writers, and others interested in Greener and the era.

Belle da Costa Greene
(Library Portraits)

One final note: Greener's family life, as the Sun-Times mentions, was a sad one. He had two families, in fact, one with his wife Genevieve Ida Fleet, the scion of a notable black Washington family, producing six children, and, after he headed to Russia, he established a common-law family with a Japanese woman, Mishi Kawashima, with whom he had three children. One of his daughters from his first marriage, Belle da Costa Greene, would go on to considerable fame on her own, as the biographer Heidi Ardizzone recounts in her enthralling book, An Illuminated Presence: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (W. W. Norton, 2007). Greene, having dropped the "r" from her last name and changed her middle name from "Marian" to the Mediterranean-sounding "da Costa," not only "passed" as a white person in turn of the century New York, becoming a society cynosure and a love interest, for a long period, of the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, but also, astonishingly, the person whom financier J. P. Morgan chose to organize his library and subsequently the first Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. The article notes that Greene ordered all her papers burned before her death in 1950, but the discovery of her father's papers could shed light not only on his life and times, but on her, her mother, and her siblings. Ardizzone points out that she might have visited her father in Chicago in 1913, though it is unlikely that she let many people in on her familial link, even though or especially because her boss and her father both served together on the committee to build Grant's Tomb in New York!

Bella da Costa Greene
(Morgan Library, Photo: Clarence White)

Although Greener did live with cousins in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago from 1909 until his death in 1922, there is no known connection to the house in Englewood. The districts sit not that far apart, however, one might imagine that someone in the Greener family could have moved to Englewood at some point, as that has been a predominantly black neighborhood of Chicago since the 1920s. In fact, it would be fascinating, I think, for some enterprising journalists, scholars and creative writers to trace out some of the connections among black Chicagoans radiating outwards from Greener and his relatives. I have noted to friends that you never know whom you might come across here or in other major cities. Once, a few years back when I went with my cousin to meet an elderly woman who had a little gallery in her beautiful South Side house and was selling some of my cousin's paintings, I noted what appeared to be some very fine art. It turned out that she and her husband were longtime major collectors of all kinds of art, most of it by African Americans, some of whom, like Charles Sebree, had been close friends of hers. (I will always also recall a beautiful sculpture by the Russian artist Archipenko.) But most remarkable to me was my discovery, when wandering in her living room, of a photo of a man whose face I immediately recognized, having grown up hearing about him and having even written a poem, many years before, that called his name forth. The man, it turned out, was her grandfather. And, it also turned out, he was the first black US Senator, seated during Reconstruction, from none other than Mississippi: Hiram Rhodes Revels. She seemed stunned that I knew who he was; I was stunned that I was standing there talking to one of his direct descendants. I imagine there are people who might know the story of Greener's trunk, and his family, if they talk to the right people and look in the right places, here in Chicago. And there are more such troves, and histories, and stories, our histories and stories, out there, waiting to be discovered, and told.