Richard Henry Green

American physician

Richard Henry Green (1833-1877) was the first African American to graduate from Yale University. After a brief stint as a schoolteacher, he worked mainly as a physician in Hoosick, New York. During the American Civil War, he served as an acting assistant surgeon in the United States Navy. Since 2014, research has unearthed documents about his life and two photographs, which shed light on his personal views, race, family life, and death.[1]

Early life

Green was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Richard Green, a bootmaker who worked and lived some four blocks from the Yale campus, near the corner of State and Chapel Streets. The elder Green helped establish St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, an African American church on nearby Park Street.[2]

To prepare for admission to college, Green studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics with Lucius Wooster Fitch, an 1840 graduate of Yale and a son of the Yale College pastor. He entered Yale in 1853 and he commuted from his home in a Black neighborhood. Greene later joined the literary society Brothers in Unity and the Sigma Delta fraternity. He graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1857.[3]

After graduating, Green taught school in Milford, Connecticut, and after a year and a half took a teaching job at the Bennington Seminary in Bennington, Vermont.[2] by 1861, he had changed the spelling of his surname to Greene.[2][1]

Beginning in March 1860, he studied medicine at Dartmouth College, and he received his MD in 1864.[1][2] In letters to his fiancee, Greene wrote, "I am studying all my strength will allow -- from morning until late at night for I feel a great lack of acquirement."[1]

Military service

Two years into the American Civil War, in November 1863, Green entered the U.S. Navy as an acting assistant surgeon. According to an 1877 letter from his father to the Yale secretary, Green "was sent to the U.S. Steamer State of Georgia blockading off N. Carolina under Admiral Porter. He was on that vessel about a year, when she was taken out of commission, and he was put on waiting order 3 weeks. During that time he was married to Charlotte Caldwell of Bennington, VT. Then he was ordered to the Steamer Seneca and was at the taking of Fort Fisher, & the other fortifications in the Cape Fear river."[2] On the USS Seneca and he handled cases of yellow fever, and smallpox.[1]

Greene wrote to his wife Lottie about seeing Norfolk, Virginia and he attested to local views of the Union occupation:

All the young men have gone out of the place with the Confederates and a kind of gloom hangs over the city. A good many of the secesh [Secessionist] ladies remain—they turn their heads when they meet any of our officers. . . . I really cannot conceive that we shall ever be a united people. Words can hardly express the bitterness of the Southerners toward the North.[1]

In September 1864, he was granted military leave to marry in Bennington, Vermont. He left the military in 1865.[1]

Life in New York

After the war, Green and his wife (known as Lottie) moved to Hoosick, New York, where he practiced medicine.[2][1] Nonetheless, he did consider whether to return to teaching or to take up Christian ministry.[1]

"He was fond of the study of natural history and spent much time collecting plants and objects of interest in that department. He was a most amiable and genial man, and a practical Christian. He was a member of the County Medical society since 1872", according to an 1897 book, Landmarks of Rensselaer County, New York.[4]

Greene died in Hoosick on March 23, 1877, “of disease of the heart leaving a wife & daughter”, according to his father's letter.[2] Branch speculates that Greene experienced John Henryism, that is, health deterioration while coping with social discrimination, such as racism.[1]

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Branch, Mark Alden (March/April 2023). "History, found. Richard Henry Greene was the first Black graduate of Yale College. Now we can see him ". Yale Alumni Journal: 32–35. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Schiff, Judith. "The life of Richard Henry Green". Yale Alumni Magazine. Retrieved November 19, 2022.
  3. ^ Kaminer, Ariel (March 1, 2014). "Discovery Leads Yale to Revise a Chapter of Its Black History". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved November 19, 2022.
  4. ^ Anderson, George Baker (1897). Landmarks of Rensselaer County, New York. D. Mason. p. 170.

External links

  • Richard Henry Green papers at Yale
  • Green's Yale obituary