When Clifton R. Wharton Jr. was appointed president of Michigan State University in 1969, he became the first African American in the nation to be named to head a major, predominantly white university.
For Dr. Wharton, it was just one of many firsts.
He was the first Black chancellor of the State University of New York. He was the first African American to run a Fortune 500 corporation, and the first to become deputy secretary of state, serving in the Clinton administration.
His remarkable firsts often went unheralded, earning him the nickname “the quiet pioneer.”
But Dr. Wharton, who died of cancer on Saturday in Manhattan, made clear that, though race was important, it was not the driving force in his long life of achievement.
“I’m a man first, an American second and a Black man third,” he told The New York Times after he was named president of Michigan State at age 43. “I do feel my appointment at Michigan is an important symbolic occasion, but that is not the criterion of it. It shows that if one has the skill and the talent, you’re going to make it.”
The son of a career diplomat, Dr. Wharton grew up with a worldview that was propelled by working for many years in far-flung corners of the globe. At his Harvard graduation in 1947, listening to the commencement speaker, Gen. George Marshall, talk about plans for postwar Europe, Dr. Wharton was inspired to pursue international development. A deep interest in Latin America led to a close association with Nelson Rockefeller and five years of development work in rural Venezuela, Brazil and Costa Rica.
Dr. Wharton was determined to improve the lives of people in emerging economies, developing a special interest in agriculture. As vice president of the Agricultural Development Council, he focused on countries in Asia, where he lived, taught, and conducted agricultural growth programs and research.
He constantly found himself on short lists for leadership positions in government, philanthropy, academia and business. But despite boasting a résumé that would be the envy of any accomplished professional, he always asked himself whether he was being sought after because of his skin color rather than his achievements.
In his 2015 autobiography, “Privilege and Prejudice: The Life of a Black Pioneer,” Dr. Wharton painted a picture of a driven intellectual who learned early about preparation, humility, consensus-building and the results that could be achieved with a relentless work ethic. “I had the priceless example of two rigorously educated, high-achieving parents before me,” he wrote.
Having been born “to privilege,” he was able to navigate a lifetime of evident prejudice without being stifled by its toxic fallout, he wrote.
“I strived to compete in a fully integrated fashion within the dominant society, without special help or favor due to my race,” he wrote. He also emphasized “the importance of not allowing racial discrimination or negative expectations to poison one’s sensibilities or deflect one from a chosen path.”
Clifton Reginald Wharton Jr., the oldest of four children, was born on Sept. 13, 1926, in Boston.
His father, Clifton R. Wharton Sr., was the first African American career ambassador in the U.S. Foreign Service. In 1961, he was appointed ambassador to Norway by President John F. Kennedy, becoming the first Black ambassador to a European nation. Dr. Wharton’s mother, Harriette Mae (Banks) Wharton, had a master’s degree in social work and taught at Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute, a historically Black college that later became Virginia State University.
Clifton Jr. spent his early childhood in the Canary Islands of Spain and became fluent in Spanish. Back in the United States, he attended the Boston Latin School and went on to Harvard at age 16. He interrupted his studies in 1945 to join the Army Air Corps as a pilot at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but the war ended before he could see combat, and he returned to Harvard, where he earned a degree in history.
At Tuskegee, he encountered venomous racism. “I learned that racial prejudice is an insidious fog which enters your pores to pierce your soul by destroying your self-worth and denying your humanity — but that succeeds only if you let it,” he wrote.
After Harvard, he became the first African American to attend Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, where he earned a master’s degree in international affairs.
While at Harvard, he met his future wife, Dolores Duncan, on a blind date at a dance at Radcliffe College in Cambridge. She had grown up in Harlem, where she studied modern dance with Martha Graham, and her mother was a friend of the opera star Marian Anderson. The couple married at Ms. Anderson’s estate in Danbury, Conn., in 1950. A proponent of the arts who sat on several corporate boards, Dolores Wharton was appointed by President Gerald R. Ford to the National Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dr. Wharton in 1958 became the first African American to receive a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. There he was mentored by Theodore Schultz, an economist and future Nobel laureate whose specialty was evaluating technical assistance in Latin America. That same year, Dr. Wharton joined the Agricultural Development Council, a private, nonprofit program created by John D. Rockefeller III. He spent six years in Singapore and Malaysia, his family in tow, and visited several other Southeast Asia nations.
“I am at heart an internationalist,” Dr. Wharton told Inside Higher Ed magazine in 2015. “Therefore for me, the search for knowledge and the intellectual world are not centered in one nation.”
In 1969, Michigan State’s board voted 5 to 3 to make Dr. Wharton the first Black president of a major, predominantly white university. (Patrick Francis Healy, a Jesuit priest who was of mixed race, became president of Georgetown University in 1874. He passed for white his entire life, including his time at Georgetown, which at the time had fewer than 200 students.)
In November 1969, Dr. Wharton was introduced as president-elect to a thunderous standing ovation before 77,000 fans at a Michigan State home football game in East Lansing. The honeymoon ended just weeks later, when civil rights and antiwar protests swept campuses nationwide. Dr. Wharton found himself face to face with hundreds of angry students protesting President Richard M. Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. Black students questioned whose side he was on as racial tensions enveloped the nation.
“What was most impressive was how calm he was,” recalled Teresa Sullivan, who was then a Michigan State student and who later became president of the University of Virginia. “Student demonstrators were swearing in his face, and he never lost his cool.”
Dr. Wharton’s eight-year tenure was considered a success. He worked to bring more diversity to Michigan State, establishing a commission to study enrollment policies. With his wife, he led the effort to build a world-class performance venue on campus, which was dedicated in 1982 as the Wharton Center for Performing Arts.
Dr. Wharton became the first African American chancellor of the 64-campus State University of New York system in 1978.
SUNY, with its 345,000 students, was the largest college system in the country, and Dr. Wharton faced serious financial pressure and political disdain toward public education. During his first year at SUNY, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation died, and Dr. Wharton was offered that prestigious and influential position. He chose to stay with SUNY, to make good on his commitment. (A longtime trustee on the Rockefeller board, he was named chairman in 1982, another racial first.)
In his nine years as chancellor, Dr. Wharton earned a reputation for being an advocate of “public higher education in a period of tight fiscal constraints,” The Times said.
Dr. Wharton became the first Black chief executive of a Fortune 500 corporation when he was recruited by the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund in 1986. With $50 billion under management and nearly 900,000 contributors from more than 3,800 colleges, universities and educational associations, Teachers Insurance was the largest pension fund and third largest insurance company in the country.
Dr. Wharton set about reorganizing the company, now known as TIAA. In his six-year stint, he converted a “stodgy professors’ pension fund” into one of the biggest and fastest-growing financial-services companies, according to Newsweek.
Again, opportunity came knocking. When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he asked Dr. Wharton to join his administration. Despite some misgivings, Dr. Wharton agreed, and in January 1993 he was named deputy secretary of state to Warren M. Christopher, becoming the highest ranking African American in State Department history, until Colin Powell was appointed secretary in 2001.
Dr. Wharton’s short tenure at the department was a contentious one. He felt frustration at being left out of important meetings and rarely saw eye to eye with Mr. Christopher as the new administration was coming under withering fire for foreign policy failures in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti. Mr. Christopher was said to be unhappy with Dr. Wharton’s performance and lack of foreign policy experience and pressed for his removal. Dr. Wharton resigned that November rather than accept an ambassadorship.
Dr. Wharton’s “public humiliation” was denounced in The Times by A.M. Rosenthal, the paper’s former executive editor who had become a columnist. “Mr. Wharton still does not know what hit him,” Mr. Rosenthal wrote. “But pieced together, it is a story of how an Administration failed to do its duty to itself and an American achiever.”
Dr. Wharton went on to serve on numerous corporate boards and remained active in philanthropy and the arts. In 2015, the Boston Latin School, the oldest school in the country, honored him by placing his name on the wall in the school auditorium alongside such distinguished alumni as John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Leonard Bernstein.
He is survived by his wife of 74 years, Dolores, and his son Bruce, who confirmed his death. His son Clifton III died of a brain embolism in 2000 at age 48.
Reflecting on his career and the impact of race, Dr. Wharton said he struggled to understand how different versions of the “badge of Blackness” were perceived.
“I had been able to overcome barriers in part because I had not constantly waved the flag of racism or the banner of Blackness — either as a dominant reality or an excuse to justify special treatment,” he wrote in his memoir.
“Instead I had committed myself to superior performance to overcome any racism and stereotyping,” he wrote. “Why weren’t achievements sufficient evidence of what I — and our people — could achieve if given the opportunity?”
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