Scope and Content Note
The papers of Lorenzo Johnston Greene (1899-1988), pioneer in African-American historical studies and multiculturalism, editor, and civil rights and social activist, span the years 1680-1988, with the bulk of the material documenting Greene's thirty-nine year career (1933-1972) at Lincoln University, Jefferson City, Missouri, and as a professor emeritus at that historically black institution from his retirement in 1972 to his death in 1988. Before coming to Lincoln University, Greene was a field representative for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) and a close associate of Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the organization and the "father of Afro-American history." As an educator, Greene was an early advocate of the introduction of multicultural content into grade school and college texts nationwide. He wrote numerous monographs and articles, including The Negro In Colonial New England, 1620-1776, and edited the Midwest Journal, sponsored by Lincoln University. Greene's community service, in which he stressed open housing and school desegregation, included helping to found the Missouri Commission on Human Rights and chairing the human rights committee of the Missouri Association for Social Welfare and the education subcommittee of the Missouri Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. His papers are organized into seven series: Family, Academic, Professional Organizations, Public Interest Organizations, Speeches and Writings, Addition, and Oversize.
Greene maintained a long-term correspondence with family members, childhood friends, and friends cultivated in New York and Washington, D.C., during graduate school at Columbia University and field work with the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Correspondence, biographical material on Greene, and subject files concerning family members are available in the Family series. The largest file in the series concerns Greene's wife, concert pianist Thomasina T. Greene, and includes Greene's correspondence as her tour manager and material on her father, Thomas W. Talley, a chemistry professor and pioneering African-American folklorist who wrote Negro Folk Rhymes.
The Academic series documents Greene's career at Lincoln University and is organized into Administrative, Correspondence, General, Midwest Journal , and Research subseries. The Administrative subseries includes files related to African-American studies courses and curricula, academic committees, and student affairs. Large files in the subseries relate to the Institute for Drop-Out Prevention and Teacher Orientation and to the Institute to Facilitate Desegregation in Kansas City, Mo., Public Schools, headed by Greene during 1971-1974.
Correspondents prominent in the Correspondence subseries of the Academic File include Herbert Aptheker, Gerald L. Davis, Herman Dreer, W. E. B. Du Bois, William L. Dunn, Mervyn M. Dymally, Merl R. Eppse, John E. Fleming, Charles W. Florence, James Frank, H. Hadley Hartshorn, J. Noel Heermance, W. B. Jason, Charles S. Johnson, Harold J. Jonas, Peter Kellogg, Charles L. Klotzer, Wilbur C. McAfee, Mabel M. Smythe, Arvarh E. Strickland, and Marion Manola Wright.
Documentation of Greene's study of the African-American experience in his home region includes a substantial file in the General subseries of the Academic series relating to his work as a consultant for the Parting Ways Museum of Afro-American Ethnohistory in Plymouth, Massachusetts, an institution focusing on black history in New England. This file contains correspondence with Marjorie E. Anderson, founder and long-time director of the museum. Also documented in the General subseries is Greene's participation with his students in the sharecroppers' roadside demonstration movement during 1939-1940 in southern Missouri, a precursor to the activist stage of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Midwest Journal subseries relates to Greene's editorship during 1947-1956. The Midwest Journal under Greene was a magazine of research and creative writing with an international reputation, emphasizing, but not limited to, African-American writers and issues. Material on the journal includes an editorial file containing biographical material on contributing writers, draft articles, correspondence with publishers, and a general correspondence file containing letters largely to and from contributing writers. General correspondents of the Midwest Journal subseries include Herbert Aptheker, Thomas Hart Benton, Cecil A. Blue, Lois M. Jones, and George Shepperson.
The Research subseries of the Academic File contains files concerning public records on African Americans in several New England states, including copies of documents related to the 1781 Jennison v. Walker case, a major factor in the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, and copies of payrolls (1778-1779) and invalid accounts (1790) of the black First Rhode Island Regiment of the Continental Army. Material on the African-American experience in Missouri contained in the Research subseries of the Academic series includes correspondence related to a county by county survey conducted by Greene of black marriages in the state during 1865-1900, a 1936 interview with former slave Dilcey Ann Patterson, a file on African-American public schools during the era of segregation, and material on the Sixty-Fifth and Sixty-Eighth regiments, United States Colored Troops, whose members founded Lincoln University after the Civil War.
Historical material on black Americans in the Research subseries of the Academic series, however, is not limited to the New England region and Missouri. Greene conducted correspondence spanning 1934-1983 with libraries and archives throughout the United States inquiring about manuscript resources on African Americans. An example of the wealth of material he uncovered through this process is correspondence from the Washington State Historical Society on George W. Bush and William O. Bush, father and son African-American pioneers and civic leaders in the Pacific Northwest.
The Research subseries also documents Greene's efforts starting in the 1930s to introduce African-American studies and multiculturalism into textbooks and curricula nationwide. A project in 1964 to chart the representation of African Americans in over 150 history and social science textbooks spanning 1941-1964 is especially well documented.
Greene's commitment to the development of African-American history as both a branch of the historical profession and as a means of black consciousness-raising is reflected in the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) file of the Professional Organizations series. Greene was active in the ASNLH, which in 1976 changed its name to the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History (ASALH), throughout his career, twice serving as program committee chair for annual meetings and, during 1965-1966, as president of the organization. Of special interest is correspondence with Carter G. Woodson, long-time executive director of the ASNLH, and Charles H. Wesley, president of Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio. Other ASNLH and ASALH file correspondents include Clarence Bacote, Andrew F. Brimmer, Herman Dreer, Mervyn M. Dymally, Merl R. Eppse, John Hope Franklin, Jacqueline Goggin, Adelaide C. Gulliver, Harvey Jackson, Luther P. Jackson, Ulysses G. Lee, Rayford W. Logan, Paul McStallworth, Louis R. Mehlinger, August Meier, M. Sammye Miller, Benjamin Quarles, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, William P. Robinson, Patricia W. Romero, Charles W. Thomas, Harcourt A. Tynes, and Raleigh Wilson.
The Public Interest Organizations series documents Greene's civil rights and social activism and includes files on the Missouri Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Missouri Association for Social Welfare (MASW), and the Missouri Commission on Human Rights. Correspondents represented in MASW file of the series include Mary E. Brooks, Edward Parsons, Richard E. Risk, and Bert Shulimson.
Developed from research at Columbia University, Greene's The Negro in Colonial New England 1620-1776, first published in 1941, is still considered a definitive work on the subject and has been republished in several editions. His thesis and dissertation versions of this work are filed with related correspondence spanning 1941-1980 in the Speeches and Writings series. Als included in the series are drafts and correspondence related to the unpublished "Abolition of Slavery in New England 1688-1776" and speeches and articles by Greene on African Americans in New England, including an especially strong file of writings on black soldiers, sailors, and military units of Revolutionary War era Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Missouri material in the Speeches and Writings series includes files on The Negro in the Making of Missouri and Missouri's Black Heritage, monographs cowritten by Greene. Greene's service between 1928-1933 as a research assistant and field representative to Carter G. Woodson is documented in several versions of Greene's transcribed diaries filed in the Speeches and Writings series.
The Addition includes general correspondence and an exchange of letters between Greene and his wife dating 1942-1954.