Belle da Costa Greene

Belle da Costa Greene (December 13, 1883 – May 10, 1950) was the librarian to J. P. Morgan. After his death in 1913, Greene continued as librarian under his son, Jack Morgan. In 1924 the private collection was incorporated by the State of New York as a library for public uses, and the Board of Trustees appointed Greene first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Born Belle Marion Greener in Washington, D.C., Greene grew up there and in New York City. Her biographer Heidi Ardizzone lists Greene's birth date as November 26, 1879. Her mother was Genevieve Ida Fleet, a member of a well-known African-American family in the nation's capital, while her father was Richard Theodore Greener, an attorney who served as dean of the Howard University School of Law and was the first black student and first black graduate of Harvard (class of 1870). After his separation from his wife (they never divorced), Greener became a U.S. diplomat posted to Siberia, where he had a second family with a Japanese woman. Once Greene took the job with Morgan, she likely never spoke to her father again. She may have met him once in Chicago around 1913, but no written records of this meeting are known. Historians long believed that Richard Greener had lost most of his papers in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In 2012, however, Chicago Sun reporter Kim Janssen reported that a treasure trove of documents formerly belonging to Richard Theodore Greener had been recently discovered in the attic of an abandoned house in Chicago. Further investigation of these papers may shed more light on Greener's life, and possibly onto his daughter's.

After her parents' separation, the light-skinned Belle, her mother, and her siblings passed as white and changed their surname to Greene to distance themselves from their father. Her mother changed her maiden name to Van Vliet, apparently in an effort to assume Dutch ancestry, while Belle dropped her given middle name, Marion, for "da Costa" and began claiming a Portuguese background to explain her dusky complexion. Sometime before 1905, she moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she worked at the Princeton University Library.

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