Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Graduate of Harvard College(132 The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science)

Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922) was a renowned black activist and scholar. In 1870, he was the first black graduate of Harvard College. During Reconstruction, he was the first black faculty member at a southern white college, the University of South Carolina. He was even the first black US diplomat to a white country, serving in Vladivostok, Russia. A notable speaker and writer for racial equality, he also served as a dean of the Howard University School of Law and as the administrative head of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association. Yet he died in obscurity, his name barely remembered. 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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Boyhood Interrupted 2. Being Prepared 3. Experiment at Harvard 4. An Accidental Academic 5. Professing in a Small and Angry Place 6. The Brutal Retreat 7. Unsettled Advocate 8. A Violent Attack and Hopeless Case 9. Monumental Plans 10. Off White 11. Our Man in Vladivostok 12. Closure in Black and White Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Katherine Reynolds Chaddock is distinguished professor emerita of education at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of The Multi-Talented Mr. Erskine: Shaping Mass Culture through Great Books and Fine Music and Visions and Vanities: John Andrew Rice of Black Mountain College.

Review :
The greatest strength in Chaddock's account is that it is driven by context. Although Uncompromising Activist focuses on the life of one man, it is a case study in how an individual’s life is defined as much by temporal circumstance as by individual choice. —History: Reviews of New Books Mrs. Chaddock does a fine job in the short space she has to examine Mr. Greener’s life, accomplishments, and disappointments, something that he had to always struggle with. For bringing back to life a voice that has been lost and forgotten, this book does a good job. —San Francisco Book Review Uncompromising Activist is a lively tale that will interest anyone curious about the human elements of the equal rights struggle. —Mixed Race Studies Historians of education and of postbellum Black history will, of course, want to read this book. But so will many others. Chaddock deftly uses Greener's life as a window into each of the times and places in which he lived and into each of the debates in which he engaged. Uncompromising Activist thus would fit nicely into an undergraduate course on either African American or nineteenth-century U.S. history. Readers outside academia would find it a coherent and ample introduction to Black history after the Civil War—a surprising and rare accomplishment for a scholarly book, let alone a scholarly biography . . . Chaddock has written a fascinating account of a man and a world that helped shape our own and that deserve rediscovery. —Michael David Cohen, University of Tennessee, Black Perspectives An important addition to the growing corpus of African American biography, this slender volume resurrects to historical memory Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922), a semi-obscure figure best known for being the first black graduate of Harvard College. Katherine Reynolds Chaddock, a distinguished professor emerita of education at the University of South Carolina, shows in this clear and straightforward narrative that Greener actually deserves recognition for several other important contributions to civil rights in the early Jim Crow era as well. Readers may even come away wondering why Greener is not placed alongside his more famous contemporaries Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois in the pantheon of great black leaders of his generation. —T. Adams Upchurch, East Georgia State College, Journal of Southern History