Uncompromising Activist

Katherine Reynolds Chaddock's biography tells us that, aside from being Harvard University's first black graduate, Richard T. Greener (1844–1922) was an intellectual, civil rights advocate, school principal, professor, librarian, lawyer, failed businessman, fundraiser, and lecturer, who served as the U.S. commercial agent to the Russian city of Vladivostok from 1898 to 1905. Despite his racial activism, he moved easily in white circles and was the father of five children who, with their mother, passed into white New York society after the couple's separation. In Vladivostok, he apparently glossed over his own racial identity. It seems that he lived a storied life, yet this biography shows that he lived it mostly on the periphery of events. His resulting absence from wider historical memory should not necessarily exclude him as the subject for a biography. Indeed, in his day he earned public recognition from both blacks and whites. Undoubtedly the young black men he championed to come to the University of South Carolina on full scholarships greatly admired him. In Vladivostok, his commercial reports on Siberian trade possibilities and his efforts on behalf of Chinese and Japanese citizens stranded there during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) were stellar. Such localized achievements, however, were interspersed with a series of false starts. His goal was to become a lawyer, yet he never had much of a practice. He was principal of the famed Preparatory High School for Colored Youth in Washington, D.C., but for only one semester before being fired. He offered to help Booker T. Washington in his efforts to spy on the Niagara movement, but Washington never saw him as a major ally. The result is that some of the most interesting episodes in the book are ones in which Greener played only a tangential role

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