Book Reviewed: Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College, by Katherine Reynolds Chaddock

The life and work of a distinguished civil rights activist Richard Greener

In this book, author Katherine Chaddock of the University of South Carolina chronicles the fascinating and colorful life of civil rights activist Richard Greener (1844-1922). Long before Dr. Martin Luther King, there were many African American leaders in the nineteenth century. They fought for equality and civil rights which includes Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston, Booker T Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Wells Brown and Richard Greener.

Professor Chaddock re-creates the life and turbulent times of a fierce leader whose quest was for equality and dignity of colored people. The book provides fascinating insights into her subject’s magnetic character, with a mixture of piety and ambition. It partly explores the complexities of his relationships with other civil rights leaders and the American politicians of the day. From humble beginnings in Boston to the National Capital and later Russia as an American representative brings to life this almost forgotten African-American statesman. Despite discrimination and blatant racism before and after the Civil War, Greener’s achievements are mainly in the field of education and as a statesman. He met with many successes and disappointments that illuminates the ongoing struggles to define citizenship in a democracy. He graduated from Harvard and later became a professor at University of South Carolina. When he was a student, he attended lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Ward Beecher, and listened to antislavery meetings of Frederick Douglass and Senator Charles Sumner. He was never consistently linked to an accessible and definitive position like Frederick Douglass’s fight for emancipation; Booker T. Washington’s ideas about accommodation; and W. E. B. Du Bois’s uncompromising activism and full inclusion. His education and philosophy, light-skinned “white man” like features and street smartness in making friendship with whites isolated him from black masses. In a final irony for a life that often played between being black and white, his death certificate identified him as “white.”

This is the result of the groundbreaking research into the documents in a steamer trunk found in an abandoned residence in Chicago, long forgotten in the history. From this emerges the life of a leading pioneer and an uncompromising black activist. Highly recommended to readers interested in African American history, civil rights, slavery and racial politics.