Selwyn Duke ——Bio and Archives--November 3, 2025

Cover Story | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us

The story of George Franklin Grant, a dentist, academic and recreational golfer, is interesting. This isn’t just because he, a Harvard professor, invented a wood-composite golf tee in 1899. It’s that under many Americans’ conception of history, he shouldn’t even have existed. You see, Grant was a successful black man in the U.S. almost 100 years before the civil-rights era or affirmative action’s birth.

Yes, you read that right. Grant was admitted to Harvard Dental School in 1868 and then became Harvard University’s first black faculty member in 1871.

Grant wasn’t alone, either (except in his golf-invention exploits). By 1920, there were 3,560 black physicians in America, a figure including 65 black women. While this didn’t represent “proportionality” — blacks were 10 percent of the U.S. at the time — it did constitute 2.5 percent of the total number of American physicians. Not bad in a country supposedly so “white supremacist” that blacks were surely relegated at the time to cotton-fields toil. (Black youths may want to ponder this, too, when believing they “just can’t make it” in 2025 because the “man” is keeping them down.)

Many wouldn’t guess black Americans enjoyed such success a century or more ago, indoctrinated as they are with Howard Zinn-esque revisionist history. In fact, while I was hardly a politically correct youth (we didn’t use the word “woke” back then), I myself was surprised when getting a glimpse into actual American history.

My experience occurred when I was about 19 and, curious about dear ol’ dad, started perusing his old NYC podiatry school yearbook. What most struck me was not how young my father looked at the time, the late ’40s to early- to mid-’50s, but all the black faces gracing the pages. In fact, inspired to do a count, I determined that the black graduates were approximately 12 percent of the class. This was greater than black Americans’ share of that time’s national population (10 percent) or their proportion of NY state’s population (7.5); it also was about exactly the........

© Canada Free Press