Richard T. Greener holds two academic “firsts.” He was the first African American to graduate from Harvard (1870) and he was the first black professor at the University of South Carolina (USC) (1873). In 2018 USC honored him with a nine foot tall statue.
Greener was born in Philadelphia but moved to to Boston as a child. He attended Phillips Andover Academy and later Oberlin College. Upon graduation from Harvard, he became principal of Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth. In 1873, according to The Black Past, he became professor of “Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of South Carolina where he also served as librarian and taught Greek, Mathematics and Constitutional Law. ” The University had been integrated during Reconstruction, leading many white parents to withdraw their sons from the school.
While teaching at USC, Greener earned a law degree from the college’s law school. During the Reconstruction Era, the college had a number of black students and even had three black trustees. The integrated college was close when Wade Hampton took control of state government in 1877. Greener moved to Washington, DC after South Carolina came under the rule of the white supremacist “Redeemers” and he became a professor at Howard University’s law school. He later became dean of the law school.
There are some ironies with USC’s recent moves to honor Greener. The university has a dorm named after Wade Hampton, the Confederate general who closed the Reconstruction Era college in order to end black attendance, resulting in Greener’s termination. Yes, that’s right. When Hampston staged a coup to install himself as governor, he found it preferable to close the state’s principal institution of higher education rather than let Black people attend.
The University of South Carolina also recently produced a play about Greener that was performed in the Longstreet Theater, named after Augustus B. Longstreet, an academic avatar of white supremacy in the lead-up to the Civil War. Augustus was the uncle of Confederate General James Longstreet.
Of course the ultimate irony is that there were more black students at the school during Reconstruction than there were in the 1950s. The saddest of ironies.
Harvard honored Greener with a portrait in Annenberg Hall:
