Editorial of November 21, 2024

Clifton R. Wharton Jr.: Paving the Way with a Litany of Firsts

Sadly, last Saturday, one of our own left us. Clifton Wharton, who with his wife of 74 years, Dolores, lived in Cooperstown for many years, died, in New York City, after a brief bout with cancer. He was 98, and he led a very full, and very meaningful, life. He worked hard to achieve it.

Born in Boston, Wharton, as the son of a successful career diplomat, lived for many years in many parts of the world before returning to Boston Latin School and then to Harvard, which he entered when he was 16. During his college years he took a break, in 1945, to join the Army Air Corps at Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, where he trained as a fighter pilot. The war ended before he saw action, and he returned to Harvard to earn a degree in history. Later, in 1992, Harvard bestowed upon him an Honorary Degree, one of 63 that he received during his lifetime.

Clif Wharton is well known for his many firsts: He was the first African American to attend the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a master’s degree in international affairs; the first African American to receive a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago (1958); the first African American to be named head of a major, predominantly white, university (Michigan State University, in 1969; he was 43 at the time); the first African American chancellor of the State University of New York (1978; SUNY, the largest college system in the country, has 64 campuses. Clif Wharton spent nine years there, earning a reputation as an advocate of public higher education in an economic morass); the first African American to become chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation Board (1982); the first African American chief executive of a Fortune 500 corporation (TIAA-CREF, in 1986, for six years). When President Bill Clinton asked Dr. Wharton to join the State Department as deputy secretary of state, in 1992, he became, for a time, the highest ranking African American in State Department history—until Colin Powell came along as secretary in 2001. He was a director of, at various times and among others, the Ford Motor Company, Time Warner, Equitable Life, PBS, the New York Stock Exchange and Tenneco. He served six presidents in foreign policy posts.

In the latter part of the last century the Whartons spent their summers in Cooperstown, where Wharton was a trustee of The Clark Foundation and Bassett. They entertained guests from afar, taking care to introduce them to their village friends, and took great advantage of the many activities—concerts, lectures, events and exhibitions going on nearby. They enthusiastically attended Glimmerglass Opera, as it was known at the time, where for many years Dolores Wharton served as a trustee. They were often seen as well eyeing the produce at the Cooperstown Farmers’ Market and navigating their visitors through the Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at Fenimore Art Museum.

Clif Wharton was a sublime overachiever. He believed hard work and superior accomplishment would overcome the Black barriers and stereotypes that so many of his race come up against. As he once told “The New York Times,” “I am a man first, an American second and a Black man third.” And that clearly worked. He, and his wife with him, led a life that was fruitful, rewarding, instructive and exemplary, and he got there because, as he wrote in his biography— “Privilege and Prejudice: The Life of a Black Pioneer,” written here, in Cooperstown, and published by Michigan State University in 2015—he strongly believed in “the importance of not allowing racial discrimination or negative expectations to poison one’s sensibilities or deflect one from a chosen path.”

Clif Wharton left this world a better place. We will miss him.