Richard Theodore Greener was an African-American lawyer, educator, and diplomat. He was the first black person to graduate from Harvard University.
Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) was a pioneering African American scholar who excelled in rhetoric, philosophy, law, and classics during the Reconstruction era.
Richard Greener was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1844. He moved with his family to Boston in 1853, where he was unable to attend public school due to the color of his skin. He enrolled in a private school but dropped out after a few years to support the family after his father left for the California Gold Rush, never to return. One of his employers, Franklin B. San𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧, helped him enroll in the preparatory school (Oberlin Academy) at Oberlin College.
He then enrolled at Phillips Academy and graduated in 1865. He attended Oberlin College for three years before transferring to Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1870. His admission to Harvard was an “experiment” by the administration and paved the way for more black Harvard graduates. He broke ground as Harvard’s first black graduate in 1870.
Within three years, he also graduated from law school at the University of South Carolina, only to be hired as the school’s first Black professor, after a brief stint as associate editor for the New National Era, a newspaper owned and edited by Frederick Douglass.
In 1875, Greener became the first African American elected to the American Philosophical Society, the principal scholarly association for classical studies in North America. In 1876, he was admitted to the South Carolina Supreme Court, and the following year he was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar. He went on to serve as dean of Howard University Law School.
In 1898, he became the first black U.S. diplomat to visit a white country, serving in Vladivostok, Russia. He continued to serve as an American representative during the Russo-Japanese War, but left the diplomatic service in 1905.
In 1902, the Chinese government honored him for his service in the Boxer War and his aid to famine victims in Shansi. Liberia’s Monrovia University awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1882, as did Howard University in 1907. Phillips Academy and the University of South Carolina both honor Greener with annual scholarships. Phillips Academy also named a central campus in Greener’s honor in 2018, the same year the University of South Carolina honored him with a statue.
