By Lee A. Daniels

In a fiercely racist era, her complexion enabled her to pass for white – and to cross multiple boundaries of possibility

Opportunity Magazine, February 2000

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when white women, regardless of their wealth or social position, could not vote, and were widely discouraged from pursuing any meaningful work outside the home, Belle da Costa Greene achieved extraordinary success: as a chief advisor to J.P. Morgan, one of America’s greatest titans.

Vivacious, intelligent and shrewd, she had carte blanche to commit huge chunks of Morgan’s fortune to buying the art treasures that established his unparalleled private collection in midtown Manhattan, the Morgan Library. She traveled to Europe constantly on his behalf and dealt with numerous important and powerful men – some of whom took their place on the long list of her lovers.

J.P. Morgan died in 1913. Greene would continue, with J.P. Morgan’s son, who bore the same name, to build and oversee the collection, and become known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.” J.P. Morgan, Jr. died in 1943. Belle da Costa Greene retired from the Morgan Library in 1948 and died in 1950 at the age of 70.

The story of Belle da Costa Greene is fascinating from any perspective. What makes it even more so is that she was not white. She was black.

Or rather, it would be more correct to say that Greene was African-American, since her complexion was light enough for her to “pass” for white.

That is what she did.

But Greene’s life is far more complex than a simple story of passing. Indeed, it underscores the need for a deeper consideration of the phenomenon of passing among African Americans in the century between the end of the Civil War and the 1960s.

On the one hand, what is truly fascinating about the phenomenon is not how many African Americans who could pass for white did. It’s how many who could did not.

But, of those who did pass, how many did so out of self-hatred? And how many passed, as Greene seems to have done, for reasons of ambition and convenience – for pragmatism – rather than self-loathing?

Greene’s own comments drawn from letters to confidants suggest she had no particular negative feelings about being a “cloaked” African American. She just seemed to have decided very early in her life – in the 1880s and 1890s, when blacks were being encircled by increasingly rigid racial barriers – that a woman known as black would have absolutely no chance to realize the ambitions she obviously already felt. (Instances of African-American women “pragmatically” passing during these years may have been significantly more numerous than once thought.)

Historian Linda M. Perkins has suggested that between 1880 and 1930 some number of fair-skinned black women attended the elite Seven Sister women’s colleges – including those which had a de facto policy barring blacks* That was so even for someone like Belle, whose African-American father was himself a person of great achievement.

Opportunity Magazine, February 2000

Greene was born Belle Marion Greener, the third child (of six eventually: Four were girls; two were boys, one of whom died in infancy) and second daughter of Genevieve Fleet and Richard T. Greener. Her mother, Genevieve Ida Fleet, whose complexion was very light, was a daughter of the solidly-established Washington, D.C. black bourgeoisie. Her father, Richard T. Greener, also very light-skinned, was a well-known figure in late nineteenth-century black America. In 1865, he became the first African American admitted to Harvard College, and in 1870, he was its first graduate. In 1879, after a noted stint as a teacher and librarian at the University of South Carolina, where he also earned a law degree, Greener was appointed dean of Howard University Law School. An active Republican, in the mid-1880s he was sent to New York City as secretary of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument and chief examiner of the Municipal Civil Service Board.

By the early 1890s, however, the political currents, always extremely treacherous for any black appointee in these years, turned against him. Greener began a downward spiral that blotted out the promise of his early years and completely estranged him from his family. His wife and children, all of whom were very light-skinned, had apparently begun to pass for white when he separated from them in the late 1890s. He died in Chicago in 1922. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the ” Greene” family, black, had ceased to exist. The “Greene” family, white, had taken its place.

By then, Belle Greene had already re-made herself in that fashion and was working at the Princeton Library, where her intelligence and industriousness attracted the attention of J.P. Morgan’s nephew, Junius Spencer Morgan, a Princeton alumnus who was an advisor to the Library. J.S. Morgan was an aesthete whose advice in artistic matters his uncle took very seriously. Looking for someone to oversee his burgeoning collection, Morgan brought the young woman his nephew recommended in for an interview, and then promptly hired her.

In fact, as Greene’s comments in her letters makes clear, she concocted a story about a Portuguese grandmother to explain the brown tinge in her complexion. It’s not clear that anyone in the circles of the white haute bourgeoisie and the very rich in which she moved – who were extremely discerning and status-conscious in matters of family background – really believed it. It’s not even clear whether Morgan himself did.

What is clear, though, is that he didn’t really care whether Greene was in fact African-American. There were no accounts to suggest that he felt romantically towards her. Morgan, long married when he hired Greene, had never been one to let his marriage interfere with his attraction to other women. But no known evidence indicates that he and Greene were ever lovers. To him, she was an indispensable business associate. What counted was her talent, which made it possible for her to cross boundaries of possibility along America’s color line and fashion for herself an extraordinary life. As Heidi Ardizzone wrote in her 2007 biography of Greene, “Over the course of her life, she moved between and across lines of color, class, culture, nation and world views.”

Of course, it can be said with certainty that had Greene been brown-skinned – unquestionably African-American – Junius Morgan would not have recommended her to his uncle. (Of course, had her complexion been darker, she would never have gotten a clerk’s job at the Princeton Library in the first place.)

But the point is that just as Greene had taken advantage of the play in possibility that existed in the American racial scene even during this era of a pervasive, suffocating racism to rise beyond what had seemed possible, so, too, had the two Morgans, in order to gain the services of an extraordinary find.

Opportunity Magazine, February 2000

In other words, the story of Belle Marion Greener/Belle da Costa Greene illuminates the complexity of how race could matter – and not matter – in the century between the end of the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when extraordinary people on both sides of the color line met under extraordinary circumstances. But one must also realize that this expanding of boundaries of possibilities could, and did, happen most often when passing wasn’t a possibility, or was ignored as a possibility.

After all, the achievements of many African-American figures of this and other pre-1960 periods – an Anna Julia Cooper, the first black women’s college graduate, who helped found the precursor of Washington’s famed Dunbar High School; an Absalom Boston, a black whaling captain who commanded his own ship with an all-black crew out of the port of Nantucket; or a Sojourner Truth – are all examples of boundaries of possibility being crossed despite a profoundly restricted racial milieu.

These and other stories bring us once again to a fundamental lesson about the black American past: It is no tale of woe.

It is a tragic tale, yes – which means that it contains elements of heroism, too; of individuals and a people striving against impossible odds to achieve their ambitions. That is what makes the tragedy of the black past not just bearable but worth knowing and, ultimately, inspiring.

*Source: “The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in Seven Sister Colleges, 1880 – 1960,” Harvard Educational Review, Winter, 1997

This article first appeared in slightly different form in Opportunity Journal, February 2000, pp. 70-74

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

To learn more about Belle da Costa Greene:

• Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege, W.W. Norton, New York City, 2007
• Jean Strouse, Morgan, American Financier, Harper Perennial, New York City, 2000
• Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance, Grove Press, New York City, 2001