[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 57 (Thursday, March 31, 2022)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E331]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  TRIBUTE TO RICHARD THEODORE GREENER, THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN TO 
                    GRADUATE FROM HARVARD UNIVERSITY

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                          HON. DANNY K. DAVIS

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 31, 2022

  Mr. DANNY K. DAVIS of Illinois. Madam Speaker, Academician, Attorney, 
businessman, Civic leader and accomplished American, Mr. Richard 
Theodore Greener, the first African American to graduate from Harvard 
University. Richard Greener was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 
January 30, 1844. He quit school in his mid-teens to earn money for his 
family, but one of his employers helped him enroll in a preparatory 
school at Oberlin College. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1865, 
and he spent three years at Oberlin College before transferring to 
Harvard College. His admission to Harvard was an experiment by the 
administration and paved the way for more Black students to attend 
Harvard.
  Richard Theodore Greener graduated from Harvard College in 1870. In 
1875, Richard Greener became the first African American to be elected 
as a member of the American Philological Association. He graduated from 
law school at South Carolina university, and practiced law in South 
Carolina, then Washington, D.C. before joining the Howard University 
Law School as a professor, and eventually a dean.
  In 1875, Richard Greener was chosen by the General Assembly of South 
Carolina to be a member of a commission to revise the South Carolina 
School system. In 1880, he became a law clerk of the first comptroller 
of the United States Treasury; from 1876 to 1879 he represented South 
Carolina in the Union League of America and was President of the South 
Carolina Republican Association in 1887. From 1885 to 1892, he served 
as Secretary of the Grant Association, where he is credited with having 
led the eventual fundraising effort which brought in donations from 
90,000 people worldwide to construct Grant's Tomb, still the largest 
mausoleum in North America. From 1885 to 1890, he was Chief Examiner of 
the Civic Service Board for New York City and County; and in the 1896 
election, he served as the Head of the Colored Bureau of the National 
Republican Party in Chicago. In 1875, he was appointed as the United 
States Commercial Agent in Vladivostok, Russia, and stayed in the 
foreign service until 1905.
  Richard Greener was well recognized for his work. While at Harvard in 
1868 and 1870, he earned the Bowdoin Prize. He received two honorary 
Doctor of Laws degrees, one from Monrovia College in Liberia in 1882 
and the second one from Howard University in 1907. In 1902, the Chinese 
government decorated him with the order of the Double Dragon. Phillips 
Academy has the Richard T. Greener 1865 Endowed Scholarship. The 
University of South Carolina's Black Alumni Council Sponsors the 
Richard T. Greener Endowment Fund, the Central Quadrangle at Phillips 
Academy was named in his honor in 2018, and the University of South 
Carolina is honoring his legacy by erecting a statue on campus.
  Richard T. Greener eventually settled in Chicago where he worked for 
an insurance company, practiced law and lectured about his life and 
times.
  Much of this information came from Mr. Greener's Harvard diploma and 
personal papers discovered in an attic in Chicago.
  What a great man, what a great history, what a great American.

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