A race-based decision made at Harvard in 1890 was a reverse quota with potentially giant effects

What did Harvard fear?

In 1890, the president of Harvard made an unjust decision, against his own directives, that silently smoothed the path for multitudes of much worse injustices to come – injustices that tore through the 20th century and still afflict us.

My great-great-uncle Clement Garnett Morgan (1859-1929) was the first Black person to graduate from both Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He was the first Black alderman in Cambridge and all of New England. With his Harvard classmate W.E.B. Du Bois and others, he founded the Niagara Movement and was a leader of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Uncle Clem, as my family always called our illustrious ancestor, first came to public attention as a Harvard undergrad. As a junior in 1889, he won the Boylston Prize for Elocution; Du Bois came in second. This was a huge deal, noted in newspapers around the country: The New York Evening Post reported that “Mr. Morgan, who is uncompromisingly black, chose a passage from Carl Schurz on the Emancipation Proclamation, and rendered it in a manner to touch deeply those whose memories could bridge the chasm even of a single generation.” That year, when he was one of only three Black seniors, his class chose him as class orator. He was all over the news again: a man born into slavery was now not only a top student but also recognized as worthy by most of his fellow seniors at Harvard, the oldest, most famous college in the country. Newspaper reporters commented on his modesty, his polished manners and his clear and precise diction.

As his great-great-nephew, I’ve always been extremely proud of Uncle Clem’s honors. Yet an honor denied – an injustice I only recently learned of – has had my mind reeling on behalf not only of Uncle Clem, but of how different the past century might have been had Harvard confronted its deep-seated fears and done the right thing. 

This may sound hyperbolic, but hear me out.

A few months ago, in preparation for writing a different essay, I came across one by professor Bruce A. Kimball published in 2009 and titled “This Pitiable Rejection of a Great Opportunity.” Kimball is either the first to look at or to write about the process leading up to the selection of speakers at the 1890 commencement ceremonies. At those ceremonies, Du Bois, as one of the six commencement speakers, and Uncle Clem, as class orator, spoke. Two Black men speaking at Harvard graduation exercises – an earthquake! Du Bois later wrote “New England and indeed the whole country reverberated.” 

But Uncle Clem should have spoken twice. Kimball discovered that he was rightfully – on merit – also chosen as a commencement speaker, but some of the professors blanched (and I use that word on purpose) at the idea of two Black commencement speakers.

Modernized, merit-based Harvard

The background to this decision is that Charles W. Eliot (1834-1926) became Harvard president in 1869. For pretty much all of Harvard’s history before Eliot, success there depended more on a student’s social status than on academic achievement. Rich boys, sons and grandsons and great-great-grandsons of graduates who generally behaved themselves and were decent students were the commencement speakers. Eliot had been one of these rich Harvard undergrads, and later an assistant professor in math and chemistry. But at about the same time his family’s fortune went bust, he also lost out on gaining a full professorship. In an unusual move, he took some of his family’s money and went to Europe to study educational institutions. He saw that their more meritocratic practices and focus on science, engineering and design were boosting their countries’ economies. On his return to the United States, he was hired as chemistry professor at the new MIT.

Harvard appointed Eliot its president in 1869. Over the next decades, he modernized the undergraduate program and professional and graduate schools and overhauled the grading system. To Eliot, building and sustaining a Harvard meritocracy – rewards based on talent and effort, not social standing – would benefit the nation as a whole. He also believed that Black students should get the same educational opportunities as white students.

This modernized, merit-based Harvard accepted Uncle Clem from Boston Latin, which he had entered after graduating from the precursor of the famous Dunbar High in Washington, D.C., and teaching at the Charles Sumner High School in St. Louis for a few years. Two years later, Du Bois entered the class of 1890 after two years at Fisk. A few other Black students had entered and graduated since 1870. So the two friends weren’t the first Black Harvard students, and they weren’t even the first to represent their classmates at graduation – Robert H. Terrell, later the country’s first Black federal judge, was chosen a commencement speaker in 1884.

Commencement speaker process

The faculty had a process for choosing six commencement speakers. Before Eliot, the choice was based more on social status than academic merit, although most speakers were also good students. Kimball writes that, under Eliot, the selection process got much tougher. Based on grade point average, only about a quarter of the soon-to-be graduates qualified for consideration. Uncle Clem and Du Bois made the cutoff. Those students who wanted to advance in the competition had to write an essay. Faculty provided feedback. Forty-four students who thought they had a chance based on that feedback presented their essays in front of a seven-member faculty committee. This committee chose the six commencement speakers.

Kimball relies on the archived papers of committee member James B. Thayer, a highly respected law professor. Of the seven committee members, five ranked Du Bois’ presentation “Jefferson Davis as a Representative of Civilization” best, and the other two placed him among the top six; he was the only student to make all seven professors’ top-six list. 

Uncle Clem’s essay was “Garrison Abolitionists,” a copy of which has yet be found. Thayer recorded that he ranked Uncle Clem the best writer-presenter; he also made three other professors’ top-six list.

When the committee members’ individual lists were put together to determine the top six choices, then, two of those top six were Black.

Consultation on “appropriateness”

Kimball writes: “[Francis G.] Peabody, the Plummer professor of Christian morals, then moved that the committee consult the Harvard Corporation, the legal governing body of the university, as to the appropriateness of having two African American speakers at the 1890 commencement ceremonies.” Two professors, George L. Goodale (natural history) and Charles C. Everett (divinity school) agreed with Peabody; Thayer (who said this was a “poor, timid suggestion”), LeBaron R. Briggs (English) and John H. Wright (Greek) disagreed. Committee chair Adams S. Hill (rhetoric) went along with Peabody, so the motion passed.

Peabody went privately to Eliot. Eliot agreed with Peabody that two Black speakers was one too many – sure, they were chosen fairly on merit, but the audience and the wider U.S. population probably wouldn’t like it. 

Meanwhile, Briggs had convinced Hill to “repent,” and so Hill recalled the committee. Kimball reports that Thayer’s notes show the new discussion as “intense.” Peabody’s side accepted the argument that, on top of Uncle Clem’s class day oration, Uncle Clem and Du Bois both speaking would rankle the other (all except one, white) graduates. Thayer, though, fought for Uncle Clem’s inclusion, “express[ing] deep convictions about this pitiable rejection of a great opportunity [because] such a moving, deeply impressive statement for the cause of his race by a full-blooded negro, the son of slaves, worthy to speak for them, will not come again.”

Thayer convinced Goodale, who proceeded to propose dumping Du Bois! 

Cutting Uncle Clem

After more discussion, Peabody, Everett, Goodale and Hill voted to cut Uncle Clem. Again, two Black presenters were one too many for half the committee’s and Eliot’s taste. One would make Harvard look like it was living up to its ideals. Two would – what exactly?

We know what. It would prove that Black people could compete with white people intellectually if given the chance. One might be a freak; two could signal something else.

Not only that, but colorism surely played a part. Du Bois won fair and square. But he was also light-skinned, and white writers commonly attributed many Black people’s intelligence to their white (rapist) ancestors. Uncle Clem was very dark-skinned – white writers often commented on his darkness, and my otherwise light-skinned family were proud that that calumny couldn’t stick to him. In addition, Du Bois’s essay on Confederate president Jefferson Davis, which reads as tremendously subversive today, and, in retrospect can apply to this whole debacle, would have landed easier on distracted white ears than Uncle Clem’s essay on the abolitionist Garrison, who had been persona non grata at Harvard and in most of white Boston.

The point is, these two Black men were competing properly against each other only when the group of competitors numbered 44. Once this pool was whittled down to the final six by merit, and they were among the six, they should not have been pitted against each other. As Kimball quotes Thayer, Uncle Clem “loses his fairly won place there because he is black or, to put it in its mildest form, because somebody else is black.”

The Harvard eugenicists

Eliot and the rest of them knew showcasing Du Bois made Harvard appear fair. Du Bois plus Uncle Clem would have made Harvard live its motto of “Veritas,” meaning truth. Harvard chose the former option. Erasing Uncle Clem’s honor was no sin of omission; it was a knowing sin of commission.

Any review of Eliot’s career shows that, for all his stated belief in meritocracy, he was an unreformed racist, a eugenicist who weirdly thought Black Americans should have political but not social equality and who advocated for segregation and against interracial marriage. He helped build a faculty full of men who agreed with him who wrote and spoke prolifically on why and how white supremacy was just a proven fact of nature. They were scientists, after all, and they could “prove” anything. Just as a rising generation of educated Black men and women, including Uncle Clem and Du Bois, began to shine, Harvard’s faculty and its “science” legitimized the view that, while the occasional Black person might be exceptionally able, as a people we are inferior. 

What they feared was that their so-called science could now be questioned. They had a process for finding merit. When the merit revealed didn’t conform to their racist preconceptions, they abandoned their process. But they lied by saying they had followed it. In Eliot’s academic field, this is scientific misconduct. In everyday life, it’s moral corruption and flat out cowardice.

One quit in outrage

Some will excuse Eliot and the other professors – after all, they were just men of their time and the time was racist. But Thayer, Briggs and Wright were of the same time, and Thayer could see this moral corruption for what it was. He was so outraged that – although he didn’t breach the Harvard code of omertà by making the proceedings public – he quit the committee, writing to Everett that “I felt bound and still feel bound to express in the only way open to me my very deep sense of the opportunity lost and my abhorrence at this untenable ground of rejection, so provincial, so unworthy of a great university.”

What if Uncle Clem had received his due and delivered his speech alongside Du Bois and the other four winners? On a small scale, he and our family might have benefited – the recognition Du Bois received that day definitely helped his later career and advocacy.

But on a large scale – what if the “great university,” the most prestigious home of race “science,” had followed through honestly on its meritocratic process and showcased two Black winners? Might its faculty have been forced to defend their “science” given this piece of contradictory evidence? Might its student body, faculty and alumni have wondered why – when there were only three Black students in a sea of more than 300 seniors – not just one but two of the “inferior” race rose to the top? What questions might journalists have asked Harvard faculty about this stunning result as these professors later promulgated their “science” in speeches and books? How much more ammunition would Du Bois and Uncle Clem and their allies have had as Harvard prize winners when they pressed Eliot later on his support of Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist approach? How many more educational opportunities might have opened up for brilliant Black students in Northern colleges and universities, which continued to limit their access, with Harvard even backtracking in its housing and other policies? And, given Uncle Clem’s complexion, might his rightful appearance have undercut the statements of those influential academics such as Du Bois’ mentor Albert Bushnell Hart that men such as Du Bois and Washington “prove nothing as to the genius of the races because they are mulattoes”? 

A possible past

Is it at least possible history might have taken a step off the path these Harvard academics had paved and headed in a different direction?

We can’t know. Many factors set historical events in motion. But we do know the direction that chosen path led. Scientists who trained and taught at Harvard – including notorious eugenicists Charles B. Davenport (who presumably attended the 1890 commencement exercises to get a degree that year) and William E. Castle – wrote the foundational eugenics texts that white supremacists in the United States and Nazis in Germany used to justify political suppression, denial of civil rights and mass murder, all leading to a world war we failed to learn much from long term.

My uncle Clement G. Morgan tried his hardest to do everything right, because he saw himself not just as a new citizen of a country that preached justice, tranquility and liberty, but also as a representative of his people. As he told an audience a few weeks after his graduation, “I am glad to be a negro, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart.” He worked tirelessly, climbing over barriers placed by white men in power to obtain the skills he would need to get into and excel at Harvard College and Law School. He made certain that he carried himself with the utmost dignity wherever he went. He didn’t go to Harvard to join the country’s elite – he knew that wasn’t possible even if he wanted to. Instead, he used his Harvard education, sometimes at significant peril, to fight for equal rights for his and all people, including all women, for the rest of his life. 

Harvard, on the other hand? Thanks to the efforts of researchers such as Kimball, the record continues to reveal buried facts about its past and ongoing culpability in the maintenance and protection of its vested interests, no matter the consequences for others.  

James Spencer, Ph.D., is president of The Cambridge Black History Project. Leslie Brunetta is a writer, editor and researcher.

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