"Richard Theodore Greener"

Was the first African-American graduate of Harvard College and Dean of the Howard University School of Law.He was born in Philadelphia.He moved with his mother to Boston when he was about nine years old.He quit school in his mid-teens to earn money for his family,but one of his employers,Franklin B.Sanborn,helped him to enroll in preparatory school at Oberlin College.He studied at Phillips Academy and graduated in 1865.After three years at Oberlin,Richard transferred to Harvard College and earned a bachelor's degree in 1870.His admission to Harvard was "an experiment"by the administration and paved the way for many more black Harvard graduates.On September 24,1874 he married Genevieve Ida Fleet and had six children.One of his daughters Bella da Costa Greene,a prominent librarian.He separated from his wife,they never divorced.She and her daughters changed their names to "Greene" to dissociate themselves from him.His daughter Bella,personal J.P.Morgan,passed for white.Sick of Washington politics,in 1898,he accepted a post from President William McKinley in Vladivostok,Russia.Leaving his family,he took a Japanese Mishi Kawashima,with whom he had three children.He was praised for his efforts as a U.S. agent during the Russo Japanese war,but he was fired in 1905 after a smear campaign.After leaving the foreign service in 1905,he settled in Chicago with relatives.Richard held a job as an agent for an insurance company and practiced law.He occasionally lectuured on his life and times for the remainder of his life.He died of of natural causes in Chicago.His Harvard diploma and other personal papers were discovered in an attic on the South Side.