{"id":36060,"date":"2014-03-18T02:48:24","date_gmt":"2014-03-18T02:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36060"},"modified":"2014-03-18T03:04:19","modified_gmt":"2014-03-18T03:04:19","slug":"new-contenders-emerge-in-quest-to-identify-yales-first-african-american-graduate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36060","title":{"rendered":"New Contenders Emerge in Quest to Identify Yale\u2019s First African-American Graduate"},"content":{"rendered":"

New Contenders Emerge in Quest to Identify Yale\u2019s First African-American Graduate<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2014-03-16<\/p>\n

Ariel Kaminer<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

For Richard Henry Green<\/a>, recently declared to have been Yale College\u2019s first known African-American graduate, fame, or at least the certainty of his claim on history, was fleeting.<\/p>\n

Just last month, an Americana specialist at the Swann Auction Galleries made public the discovery that Mr. Green, the son of a New Haven bootmaker, had attended Yale 17 years before Edward Bouchet<\/a>, an 1874 graduate previously thought to have broken its color barrier. But while Mr. Bouchet spent a century and a half on that pedestal, his accomplishments praised with every honor, from academic symposiums to undergraduate fellowships to a portrait in Yale\u2019s main library, the scant weeks since Mr. Green unseated him have brought nothing but new challengers.<\/p>\n

According to an article<\/a> in the journal Afro-Americans in New York Life and History<\/em>, a man named Moses Simons<\/a> may in fact have been the first undergraduate to break Yale\u2019s color barrier. This possibility is remarkable not just because Mr. Simons graduated long before either of the two previous contenders \u2014 all the way back in 1809, when Thomas Jefferson<\/a> was president \u2014 but because Mr. Simons is already celebrated for breaking an entirely different sort of barrier…<\/p>\n

…The record of Mr. Simons\u2019s trial includes references to him as \u201ccoloured,\u201d and to the discomfort that he aroused in some \u201cSouthern gentlemen.\u201d And the author of that trial record ended his account with a rant about keeping America free of \u201cthe African tinge.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, a number of men in the Jewish, slave-owning Simons family of Charleston, S.C., were known to have fathered children of mixed race.<\/p>\n

But as strongly as the trial record implies African ancestry, Dale Rosengarten<\/a>, founding director of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston, cautioned that \u201cunless you can actually know who the parents were, you don\u2019t actually know.\u201d She added: \u201cIf this man did have a dark complexion, darker than the average Caucasian, it\u2019s possible that he had other admixtures.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New Contenders Emerge in Quest to Identify Yale\u2019s First African-American Graduate The New York Times 2014-03-16 Ariel Kaminer For Richard Henry Green, recently declared to have been Yale College\u2019s first known African-American graduate, fame, or at least the certainty of his claim on history, was fleeting. Just last month, an Americana specialist at the Swann […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2895,459,3601,8,820,20],"tags":[17092,17097,17093,2640,17096,2327,17094,7672],"class_list":["post-36060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-campus-life","category-history","category-judaism","category-media-archive","category-religion","category-usa","tag-ariel-kaminer","tag-edward-bouchet","tag-moses-simons","tag-new-york-times","tag-richard-henry-green","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-yale-college","tag-yale-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}