52 AMERICAN HISTORY
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ESby Junius, Greene, who was 26 but claimed
to be 23, hit it off with the 64-year-old
tycoon. Morgan hired her as a librarian, in
which role she not only oversaw and
curated his burgeoning collection of antiq-
uities but ran personal interference for and
read aloud to “Big Chief,” as she called the
Wall Street dynamo. Asked later if she had
been one of Morgan’s many mistresses, Greene
would laugh and say, “We tried.”
Feted for her professional acumen, wit, and style, Belle
Da Costa Greene lived a life of self-invention, propelled by
drive and audacity. She came of age at a time of particular
poignancy, in her own life and in the nation’s, rising to a posi-
tion of power and personal satisfaction rare for a woman of
that time—or any time. Fortune brought her into contact with
Junius Morgan; preparation readied her to wow his plutocrat
uncle. The rest was Belle Greene’s doing. She survived two
world wars and a depression, shepherding the Morgan
Library for decades following its namesake’s death in 1913.
Her secret, like Duchamp’s bottle, lay in the packaging.
Four decades before the youthful Belle arrived at the Mor-
gan Library, Richard Greener, an African-American born in
Boston in 1844 to free black parents, was trying to get into
college. His paternal grandfather was an African-American
schoolteacher; his maternal grandfather
was Spanish, from Puerto Rico. A ravenous
reader, the youth, whose skin tone
bespoke his mixed ancestry, took classes
at Oberlin College and Dartmouth College
and spent senior year at Phillips Andover
Academy in Andover, Massachusetts,
that elite school’s first black student. Men-
tors helped him gain admission to Harvard
University, from which he graduated in
1870, another African-American first. Green-
er’s thesis, on Irish land tenancy, won that year’s
Bowdoin Prize.
Upon graduation Greener moved to Philadelphia, where
he became principal of a school. In that capacity he was part
of a delegation that traveled to Washington, DC, to lobby Pres-
ident Ulysses S. Grant for a federal civil rights law. He and
Grant became acquainted, and he also met and married Gene-
vieve Ida Fleet, born into a well-educated, musically inclined,
and light-skinned family of free blacks. In 1873, Greener
accepted a professorship at the University of South Carolina
at Columbia, which was integrating under Reconstruction-era
federal oversight. Greener, the institution’s first African-
American faculty member, taught, tutored under-prepared
black students in Greek, Latin, math, philosophy, and logic,
organized the university library, and earned a degree from the
law school. He was so avid a book lover that he assembled a
personal collection of African-Americana, including a copy of
Benjamin Banneker’s 1792 Almanac. In 1876 he submitted
a paper on “Rare and Curious Books” to the American Philo-
logical Association, to which he belonged.
In late 1876 the government began to withdraw federal
troops from the South. By 1877 white supremacists again
controlled South Carolina state institutions, driving blacks
out of positions of influence. Greener moved Genevieve and
their two children back to Washington, then to New York
City, where he practiced law, wrote, and was a Republican
activist. He managed the organization assigned to build a
memorial to Ulysses Grant. His work required much travel,
which along with other stresses shredded his marriage. By
1897, Greener was listing his address as his New York office;
in 1898, he and Genevieve, now parents to five, separated
formally. They never divorced. To support her offspring, Gen-
evieve Greener taught music. New York lacking an official
definition of race, she and her children apparently identi-
fied—and were identified by others—as white.
The fourth Greener child, Belle, received some training in
library science. Heidi Ardizzone, author of a 2007 Belle Greene
biography, An Illuminated Life, found Greener’s name on a list
of students enrolled in a bibliography class at Amherst Col-
lege’s Fletcher Summer Library School. Belle Greener also
may have attended Teachers College at Columbia University.
By the time Richard Greener’s olive-skinned daughter was
applying for a job with Princeton University’s library in 1901,
Race Man
As an African-American
man, Richard Greener
notched many firsts.
Big John
Financier J.P. Morgan
reigned in business and
as a patron of the arts.