Miss Greene's Secret

She changed her name and her past, risking everything for a chance to make her way. A remarkable graphic novel drawn from the life of Belle da Costa Greene—longtime director of the Morgan Library—who passed into white society during the Jim Crow era. At the dawn of the twentieth century, American society continued to draw a strict racial line. Even the faintest trace of African ancestry was enough to classify a person as Black, shaping every aspect of life in a deeply segregated nation. It was under these conditions that Belle Greener reinvented herself as Belle da Costa Greene. A young woman from Washington, D. C., she made the difficult decision to conceal her African heritage and rose to become one of the most influential cultural figures of her time, running the prestigious Morgan Library for forty-three years. For decades, she sustained this delicate balance. But what does it mean to build an extraordinary life on a truth that must remain unspoken? What is lost, when you trade one identity for another? This graphic novel biography draws from the few remaining primary sources to bring Belle's story to life through careful research and thoughtful fictionalization where the historical record falls silent.