On the first anniversary of the hanging of John Brown, December 3, 1860, abolitionists from Boston and around the country assembled in Tremont Temple to discuss the question, “How can American slavery be abolished?” Among the scheduled speakers were John Brown Jr., Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass.

But the city’s business leaders, perhaps with support from the mayor, recruited a band of proslavery agitators to sabotage the meeting. As one young participant later recalled, “[T]he howling mob swept into the hall and took possession” (77). The morning session ended with the saboteurs in control despite Douglass’s courageous fist-fighting. At the height of the conflict, one of the organizers turned to that young participant, a sixteen-year-old Boston local, and ordered him to a nearby shop to retrieve “John Brown’s revolver.” The young man turned to his hero, the famous orator-turned-pugilist, for direction. Douglass shouted, “Go!” Needing no further encouragement, the lad returned shortly with the gun under his coat (78).

No shots were fired. All the commotion led to a single arrest with no casualties. The abolitionists retreated to Joy Street Church, now known as The African Meeting House, where they held the remainder of their conference. The newly fatherless John Brown Jr. riffed on Patrick Henry by exclaiming, “Give me liberty, or I will give you death” (391). Douglass addressed the conference’s question by acknowledging that he was in favor of any method of abolition, including “the John Brown way.” The mood was for war. A mere 130 days later, the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

What happened to the teenager who toted the elder Brown’s revolver? He graduated from Harvard College in 1870 and became, three years later, Professor of Metaphysics and Mental Philosophy at The University of South Carolina. He was Richard T. Greener (1844–1922).  Greener achieved many such things in life, frequently earning the moniker “First Black _______”: graduate of Harvard, professor at a majority-white university, U.S. consul to Russia, etc. For a detailed account of Greener’s life of many firsts, the reader should seek out Katherine Reynolds Chaddock’s Uncompromising Activist (2017).

But above all, Greener was a philosopher. This was so despite his professorial career being cut short by the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877, as Greener and the African-American student majority were quickly forced out of the University of South Carolina. (For an account of this and Greener’s time at USC, see Christian K. Anderson and Jason C. Darby’s chapter on Greener in the volume Invisible No More [2021].) Greener studied metaphysics and constitutional law, and he drew his vision of Republicanism from Plato and of human equality from the Stoics. He taught these doctrines to students at South Carolina, Howard University, and occasionally even to those gathered at Douglass’s home in Washington (291–295).

I relate Greener’s story in the context of the John Brown anniversary in 1860 because his philosophy was born of the agitation and abolitionism of Massachusetts in the antebellum period. We are, for good enough reason, more accustomed to anchoring African American philosophy to Jim Crow, as in W.E.B. Du Bois’s stories from The Souls of Black Folk (1903), or to the noble self-emancipation of someone like Douglass. Greener presents us with a different historical context for American philosophy. He was a child of antebellum Boston, the inheritor of the intellectual culture of that city and Harvard. Of the latter, he would say, “I have an undoubted right to feel proud of my Alma Mater, since her green and elms, and red brick educational factories, were among the first familiar objects of my childhood” (155). He thus felt as native to Harvard and as entitled to its riches as the son of any Brahmin family. The famous Senator Charles Sumner befriended him in his youth and later recruited him into the campaign for his Civil Rights Bill. Just as importantly, Greener was the protégé of the Black leaders in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of his hometown, where David Walker wrote his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) and Maria Stewart penned her early philosophical essays.

Greener knew neither Walker, who died in 1830, nor Stewart, who left Boston in 1833. His mentor at Beacon Hill was rather the historian William C. Nell, author of The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). Nell’s argument in that text, which we find echoed in the works of William Wells Brown as well as Greener, concerns Black participation in the early Republic. The idea that Black Americans were among the architects of the Union was a key doctrine of the Beacon Hill culture of the 1850s, matched only in its import by a general concept of human equality. “Long before Calhoun and Taney,” Greener would later repeat, Black Americans “fought, lived, voted, and acted like any other citizen(s)” (357). An immediate consequence of this historical point is that the descendants of these citizens were as entitled to the benefits of the nation as Greener was to Harvard’s. The competing notion that the country belonged to a single race or ethnicity was, on Greener’s history of American letters, a latecomer fabricated by the likes of Calhoun and Taney in the 1830s and 1840s.

These broad historical points frame Greener’s arguments about race, African American identity, and the American state. By contrast with the starting point of Du Bois, for whom “Black” and “American” reflect “two warring ideals in one dark body,” Greener insisted that Black Americans had been “thoroughly identified with [the Union] from the beginning” (356). He disputed the idea that they should be treated, or should think of themselves, as an exceptional case. To do so was an element of what he called “the White Problem.” For him, the history of America, especially when read “from the pen of the negro historians” like Nell (356), was all the argument needed against not only slavery or Jim Crow but also on the questions of the ballot and education:

No sneer of race, no assumption of superiority, no incrusted prejudice, will ever obscure this record, much less obliterate it, and while it stands, it is the Negro’s passport to every right and privilege of every other American. (357)

For Greener, Black Americans are Americans first, and in some respects even the first Americans: “the only class, in fact, without a dubious or double allegiance” to its American citizenship (116). From this premise, we may follow his reasoning about other controversies of the Reconstruction era. He rejected Douglass’s argument about patriotism since Douglass began rather from the premise that American independence was the legacy of his white audience. By contrast, Greener viewed the American state as the fruit also of “colored patriots.” As a result, he stressed Emancipation as a fulfillment of the nation’s ideals, and he retained a patriotic feeling in relationship to it: for him, the war should have brought “a land free without a slave—the ideal Republic” (79), which he elsewhere called “a portion of that Republic of nations destined at some time to exist on the earth” (28).

Such a patriotic idealism, of course, seems something of a stretch from our historical vantage point, a worldview not shaped in the Boston of the 1850s. But, the consequences of Greener’s approach are nonetheless instructive, especially when we examine how he combined it with his classical learning. He did not consider his republican ideals, for instance, to be a unique contribution by Europeans. Rather, he viewed Plato and his kin as imitators of a deeper human past, including African letters. And by “imitators” he meant no invective, although he knew it to be a common canard among antiblack ethnologists. He considered imitation to be rather the basic method of cultural progress, and he examined all cultures in a global context: peoples progress principally by adopting the mores of their neighbors. It thus reflected a strength of Black Americans that they had so effectively acquired the culture of Anglo-Saxons: “A race of people who can take on the religion, language, laws and morals of their conquerors, can never be permanently kept down to a Pariah’s level” (115).

Greener’s favorite speech by Douglass was “Composite Nation,” a pro-immigration tract that Douglass delivered in Boston in 1867 while Greener was still a Harvard student. When he later debated Douglass—in 1879 in support of the right of freed people to migrate, and in 1884 in opposition to the amalgamation hypothesis—it was by more consistently applying the idea of America as composite, or what we might call multiethnic. He likewise displayed, much more so than Douglass, consistency in examining the plight of Black Americans in parity with other groups. At Harvard, he wrote an award-winning thesis on “The Tenures of Land in Ireland” (which can be read in the Greener collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). From this study, he concluded that many of the arguments raised against Black Americans were holdovers from the much longer British oppression of the Irish. His deep knowledge of world history encouraged him to view newcomers to the U.S., such as the Irish and Chinese, as benefactors rather than beneficiaries: “For the presence of all these, the Negro included, America is the gainer, humanity the debtor” (361–362).

A healthy respect for humanity in all its colors and shapes was for him sufficient rebuttal to the paternalistic arguments of the ethnologists and philosophers. His debate with Douglass at the 1879 Social Science Congress was a further application of this point. Greener defended not only the migrations of Black Southerners northward but a semblance of what we would call reparations. In this case, his reasoning was not solely a matter of racial legacies—the arguments about American identity having been largely negative and directed at the progeny of Calhoun—but rather of his views on distributive justice and peasant land ownership. He saw the rising tide of debt peonage, but he attacked it in its global context:

The land question is no new one. At the present time there are difficulties in England, Ireland, Scotland and India with regard to this tenure of land, and when we come to study them, we find many analogous cases to those in America. There are remarkable coincidences and wonderful similarities of conditions, complaints and demands, which show conclusively that injustice and wrong, and disregard of rights and abuses of privilege are not confined to any one country, race or class. As a rule, capital takes advantage of the needs of labor. (22)

Later in his literary career, Greener focused more on antiblack racism and less on issues of the general political moment. His day had passed, and his eight-year tenure (1898–1906) as consul in Siberia removed him from the forefront of American conversations. Booker T. Washington had risen to prominence, and younger thinkers like Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper had appeared on the scene. To some extent, the continued rise of Jim Crow brought him surprise as well as disappointment.

None of this, however, prevented him from formulating a powerful philosophical conception of racism. He labeled his account “The White Problem,” by which he meant the tendency to invent and forcibly oppress a pariah class:

A phase of the white problem is seen in the determination, not only to treat the Negro as a member of a childlike race, but the grim determination to keep him a child or a ward…[H]e must be developed in a pen, staked off from the rest of mankind, and nursed, coddled, fed, and trained by the aid of the longest spoons, forks, and rakes attainable. (354)

Greener’s arguments suggest that he lacked a sense of what it feels like to be a problem, and he steadfastly rejected that notion. He referred to “the useless and pestiferous discussion of the falsely-called ‘Negro Problem’” (115), concluding that the apparent problem was a fabrication by journalists and pundits. The only real problem is the white one, which combines the common human tendency toward exploitation with journalistic invention and racial myth.

The post Richard T. Greener and the Abolitionist Moment in American Philosophy first appeared on Blog of the APA.

Read the full article which is published on APA Online (external link)