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, 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’s main library, the scant weeks since Mr. Green unseated him have brought nothing but new challengers.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage
A letter collection that led to Richard Henry Green’s gaining a Yale distinction that once belonged to Edward Bouchet, an 1874 graduate.
Discovery Leads Yale to Revise a Chapter of Its Black HistoryFEB. 28, 2014
According to an article in the journal Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, a man named Moses Simons may in fact have been the first undergraduate to break Yale’s color barrier.
