56 AMERICAN HISTORY
white resistance: “If character, reputation, manly accom-
plishments, the heights reached, the palm won, still find any
black hero a `marked man,’ because of no fault of his own,
and church and society, home and club, united in thus ostra-
cizing him and his children, then is it not demonstrated that
it is not the Black but the White Problem, which needs most
serious attention in this country?”
Greener was speaking and writing from painful experience.
His multiple degrees and many achievements had been no
guarantors of income. His support of causes as diverse as
Irish independence and women’s suffrage put him at odds
with the more cautious Booker T. Washington, who seemed
never to support Greener and who in fact may have under-
mined the other man’s opportunities.
Greener’s constant struggle to support his family figured in
his and his wife’s 1897 separation. Their children remained
with her; he announced he would support them only to age
- In 1898, in another first for his race, Richard Greener
accepted a position as a U.S. government commercial agent.
He was stationed at Vladivostok, Siberia.
Around the time her father was moving out of the family
home, college student Belle was, with her siblings and
mother, living in Manhattan on West 99th Street, a white
neighborhood, shortening the family name, and, in the
1890/1900 census, identifying as white—a declaration that
may have been easier in New York City, whose population at
the time was less than 2 percent black. In this switch, the
Greeners/Greenes were not alone in the United States.
Between 1910 and 1920, 400,000 Americans of mixed racial
background nationwide disappeared from census rolls.
In Russia, Greener began a second family with a Japanese
woman. Explanations vary as to why he returned to the
United States in 1905, according to Katharine Reynolds
Chaddock, author of the only Greener biography, 2017’s
Uncompromising Activist. The formerly high-profile figure,
likely isolated by education and personal intensity, now had
less interest in activism, although he offered to mediate
between Booker T. Washington’s accommodationists and a
harder-line wing led by W.E.B. DuBois. Greener helped draft
the 1909 statement that led to the establishment of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peo-
ple. “I have never aspired to be a leader,” the frequent pio-
neer said. “I still believe and preach the doctrine that each
man who raises himself elevates the race.”
Greener spent his final years living near the University of
Chicago with three female cousins and working as a lawyer,
lecturer, and newspaper essayist. He died in 1922 at age 78,
his reputation gradually dimmed until 2014, when a cache of
his diplomas and business documents turned up in an attic in
one of the poorest neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side.
Harvard and the University of South Carolina acquired the
materials and subsequently honored him—Harvard with a
portrait in the Annenberg Library, the University of South
Carolina with a nine-foot bronze likeness outside one of the
campus libraries. None of the papers sheds light on Greener’s
remove from his family with Genevieve.
Belle Greene burned her personal papers. She retired from
the Morgan Library in 1948 but kept her hand in with regular
Bibliophilia Goes Big
Morgan spared no expense
in acquiring or housing his
collections of books and
related artifacts.
Little John
Morgan fils left it to
Greene to run and expand
his late father’s library.
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