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While many people are familiar with the activism of W.E.B. DuBoiS and Booker T. Washington, one of their contemporaries, Richard Theodore Greener (18441922), has largely been forgotten by history. Scholars assumed ihat Greeners private papers were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, but in 2009, his diplomas and personal correspondence were discovered by construction worker Rufus McDonald in a steamer trunk in a Chicago attic. Greener was a free Black man who became the first Black graduate of Harvard College (now the undergraduate program within Harvard University), suhÎ?!ciulii Katherine Reynolds Chaddock has written a thorough narrative biography, Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College, which will generate renewed attention and interest in Greener's life and work.
Greener was born in Philadelphia in 1844. His family later moved to Boston and Cambridge. He was a student in the preparatory course at Oberlin Collegiate Institute (now Oberlin College) and attended Phillips Academy at Andover. With mentoring and support from his benefactor, jeweler Augustus Batchelder, Greener matriculated at Harvard in 1865. Although he excelled in oral communication, Greener had difficulties in mathematics in part due to inadequacies in his...