A Chicago construction worker recently threatened to burn some historical documents belonging to the first African American graduate of Harvard University. He was angry because college officials refused to pay him the $60,000 that he thought they were worth.
When I heard about Rufus McDonald’s threat – or blackmail, as some would call it – I thought it was rather absurd because he would be spitefully destroying an important piece of African American history (too much of it has already been lost). Walk away, McDonald, I thought to myself; if Harvard doesn’t want the papers at that price, maybe someone else will.
McDonald found the documents – some of them water-damaged – in an old steamer trunk in the attic of a house he was helping to demolish in 2009 on Chicago’s South Side. The documents included a college diploma from Harvard, a law degree from the University of South Carolina and photos. McDonald didn’t recognize the name on the documents, but later learned of their historical value from a rare-books dealer: They had belonged to Richard T. Greener, the first African American to graduate from Harvard in 1870.
McDonald had made a marvelous find, and he then set out to try to sell the items because, he said, he could not afford to give them away.
I had never heard of Greener, either, so I was curious. He was born in Philadelphia in 1844 and later moved with his family to Boston. A group of white benefactors paid his way to Harvard in 1865 as part of an “experiment” to educate African Americans. He made it through – winning awards for public speaking and graduating with honors – and joined the faculty at the University of South Carolina (USC) in 1873 as a professor of philosophy.
While there, he studied law and obtained a law degree in 1876. Greener left the university when the government took over the school a year later, closed it and reopened it as an all-white institution. Documents pertaining to African Americans at the school were said to have been destroyed to erase that history.
Greener became dean of the Howard University law school in Washington, moved around in Republican circles while working in the nation’s capital and apparently had a cordial relationship with President Ulysses S. Grant (one of the Greener documents is said to be related to that friendship).
He seemed to have been overshadowed by other such better-known African American men of his era as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass. But Greener, too, agitated for the rights of his people, among other things writing an essay in 1894 challenging the “Negro” problem as actually a “white” problem. Near the end of the 19th century, he was appointed a U.S. diplomat to Siberia, Russia.
Greener lived out his life in Chicago’s Hyde Park, watching as his estranged children changed their names and passed for white. He died in 1922.
Early on, there seemed to be much interest by historians in McDonald’s found documents, but even Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, who heads the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research at the school, warned that he wouldn’t get rich off of them.
USC bought two of the documents – Greener’s law diploma and law license – reportedly for $52,000, and honored him in a recent ceremony. Harvard, however, apparently balked when McDonald asked for $60,000 for documents. According to McDonald, Harvard offered $7,500, but newspapers have said that the university offered considerably more. He has backed down from his threat to burn the papers.
It was not clear whether McDonald had had the documents formally appraised, which would have given him a good idea of what they might be worth. But even with an appraisal, items are only worth what someone at a given time is willing to pay for them. USC seemingly paid top dollar because the documents completed an important part of the history of African Americans there.
An appraisal is a starting point, and a sale can go beyond it or below it. I’ve been to enough auctions to know that there are always surprises, and a bidding war can skyrocket an item to a price that is both ridiculous and unrealistic.
Once a year, Swann Auction Galleries in New York holds a major sale of African American documents and ephemera coordinated by Wyatt H. Day. So Day is an expert in the field, and I reached out to him via email to ask about the documents and how much they may actually be worth.
“I read about this earlier today with great dismay,” he said about McDonald’s threat. “Mr. McDonald contacted me about two years ago as I recall, asking for an appraisal of a group of papers that he had come across. The only thing was, he wanted to dictate the amounts, which I firmly refused to do.”
I put some questions to Day via email and here’s what he had to say:
Question:
Should someone have an item officially appraised before trying to sell it?
Answer:
If you believe you have something of great value, you should definitely seek out a legitimate appraiser. The Appraisers Association is a good place to start.
Question:
If it is appraised, what does that mean? That the appraisal price is the price it should sell it for?
Answer:
If it is appraised, the appraiser should give you a realistic value, i.e., if selling to a dealer, expect to get about half of retail, and so forth.
Question:
If you can’t get the price you want, should you just walk away and try elsewhere? Should you try more than one buyer and choose the best?
Answer:
If you can’t get the price you want, move on, find another buyer. If they start in the same place, that’s probably the right price.
Question:
How can someone know when they’re offered a “good” price?
Answer:
This is really a question of what one’s expectations are. If you have an appraisal in your pocket, then you should have an idea of what the “right price” is.
Question:
Richard Greener is not a household name but his accomplishments are historical. Doesn’t that make his documents valuable?
Answer:
Richard T. Greener IS an important person as an educator, lawyer and reformer. His accomplishments are undeniable. But everything is relative. Prices, i.e, “values” are based on very real market values, established by precedent. Prices are arrived at by careful balance of historical context, frequency in the marketplace, and finally by fame.
Frederick Douglass or William Wells Brown are well-established African American figures. The first, for his extraordinary oratory as well as accomplishments – books, pamphlets, government positions, and author of one of the most famous slave narratives. The second as the author of not only the first novel by an African American, but the first play – and actually more. Their prices are almost as fixed as the gold or diamond market. Richard T. Greener is much harder to pin down, in that he doesn’t have a body of published and publicly known work, or occupy a place in terms of an event or events. He is basically known as being the first black graduate of Harvard College, where he won prizes for oratory, etc. He is known to those of us in academia, but not as well known to the broader public. And this affects the value of material relative to him.
Question:
USC reportedly paid $52,000 for two of the documents; the school apparently thought they were valuable to its portfolio. What price would you put on the Greener documents? Or what starting bid would you suggest if they were offered for sale at Swann?
Answer:
This is the most difficult of all your questions, because it is obvious that the documents were worth that figure to USC, or whoever purchased them for USC. I looked at the documents, and frankly I thought they might be worth in the neighborhood of $5,000 to $7,500 each, give or take, depending on the willing buyer-willing seller scenario.
The same goes for those associated with Harvard – and mind you, all as I recall had condition problems.
If USC actually paid $52,000, I think their board members are owed an explanation by the appraiser. An appraisal, especially one like this, would require some “comparables,” as they are called by the Appraisers Association of America and other similar bodies. I’d love to see what examples the appraiser – assuming there was one – gave to rationalize the price. Or did Mr. McDonald pull the price out of his own hat? I don’t know.
I can name any number of documents of historical import and value that have passed through my hands in the past 20 years personally and with the Swann sale that brought strong five-figure prices: A wonderful Civil War period letter from Frederick Douglass to Samuel May brought $34,000. More recently, a group of ninety-one letters (1833-1846) that discussed – among other things – the Amistad captives while they lived in the writer’s home, brought $55,000. Do you really think that two diplomas from an important, but not earthshakingly so individual could be valued at about the same price. My pre-sale “appraisal” estimate of the (Amistad) letters was $40,000/$60,000.
I think what bothers me most of all about (Mr. McDonald) is his threat to “burn” the papers if his price is not met. This is way beyond blackmail. … I’d like to deny Mr. McDonald the publicity and end the discussion. But I suppose, given the subject and what people don’t know or understand about the market in African American printed and manuscript material, the controversy will probably chug along for a few more articles.
