PASSINGS

Lorenzo J. Greene; Black Historian

Lorenzo J. Greene, 88, a retired Lincoln University professor and authority on the history of blacks in America. Greene, author of a widely used textbook on blacks in the American colonies, was an early leader of the civil rights movement in Missouri, having worked to desegregate hotels in St. Louis and housing in Jefferson City. President Herbert Hoover named him to the Commission on Negro Housing in 1931, and in the late 1950s he campaigned for establishment of the Missouri Human Rights Commission. Greene was on the faculty at Lincoln, originally a state school for blacks, for 39 years before retiring in 1972. Best known among his history books is “The Negro in Colonial New England: 1620-1776,” which is used nationally as a text. On Sunday in Jefferson City, Mo.