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Prof. Dale Green Joins the Upper School for Assembly


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When Dale Green became a student and later a teacher at Morgan State University, he didn’t know that his sixth-generation great-grandfather had played a critical part in the founding of the Baltimore college, originally known as Centenary Biblical Institute. It was only when Morgan State began preparing for its 2017 sesquicentennial celebration that Green, a professor of architecture and historic preservation—was able to make the connection, and weave together his family’s story with the university’s, and with the history of the Underground Railroad and slavery in the United States.

“Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history,” noted Green, quoting historian Carter G. Woodson, at the opening of a February Upper School assembly. Green then proceeded to recount the biography he has been able to reconstruct of the ancestor who inspires him: the Rev. Samuel Green (1802-1877), a freed slave, a farmer, a minister who envisioned and planned for a college for African Americans, and a conductor on the Underground Railroad who “used his church on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as a platform,” according to Green. Born into slavery, Samuel Green bought his freedom, became involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and then managed to purchase the freedom of his wife. When his son escaped from slavery in the mid-1850s, Rev. Green helped guide him to freedom in Canada using his intimate knowledge of the Underground Railroad network. In 1857, the same year as the infamous Dred Scott decision, the Rev. Green was sentenced to ten years in jail for possessing Uncle Tom’s Cabin making him “the only person ever sentenced for having this book,” according to Green. Pardoned by Maryland Governor Augustus Bradford in 1862, Green moved to Canada, but returned to Maryland in 1864, where he remained active in his church, participated in the first African American conference in the Methodist Episcopal church, and helped create a committee to form a college for African American seminarians that would open in 1867, and later be named Morgan State University.
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Located in Washington D.C.,  St. Albans School is a private, all boys day and boarding school. For more than a century, St. Albans has offered a distinctive educational experience for young men in grades 4 through 12. While our students reach exceptional academic goals and exhibit first-rate athletic and artistic achievements, as an Episcopal school we place equal emphasis upon moral and spiritual education.