Clement Garnett Morgan (1859-1929) was an American attorney, civil rights activist, and city official of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[1] When he and his parents were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, they moved to Washington, D.C., where Clement attended the M Street High School and trained as a barber.

Morgan's selection was unprecedented: not only was he Harvard's first African-American class day speaker, he was also the first working-class student to receive an honor normally reserved for those from elite Boston Brahmin families.

Harvard officials made a point of avoiding publicity, not wishing to suggest that his selection was based on anything other than merit, and Morgan himself refused to speak to the press.

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who knew Morgan, spoke highly of him and added, "I do not recall a single case in which a young man has shown greater endurance in struggling against all kinds of opposition.

On July 8, 1890, he made a stirring speech on "Race Unity" at the Charles Street A. M. E. Church in Boston, before a large gathering of the Colored National League.

In Morgan's speech, he stressed the importance of education, asserting that African Americans "should be given every chance of cultivating heart and head" and urging listeners to save their money and send their sons to college.

In 1902, with his good friend Butler R. Wilson, Morgan tried to fight the extradition of a black factory worker named Monroe Rogers to North Carolina, arguing that he was likely to be lynched there.

The case inspired angry protests in Boston, where it was widely believed that a black defendant could not get a fair trial in the South.

[7] Morgan was later active in the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was presided over by Wilson.

[2] Morgan and Wilson worked together again in 1915 when, with Trotter and other activists, they led a spirited but unsuccessful effort to ban The Birth of a Nation from Boston theaters.

The film, which vilified African Americans and glorified the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), was the focus of many protests in Boston.

[9] In the 1920s, New England experienced an increase in anti-Catholic KKK activity; by allying with the Catholic Church, Trotter was able to get the film banned in 1921.

[2] That year he married Gertrude Wright in Springfield, Illinois,[11] and moved to 265 Prospect Street in the neighborhood of Inman Square.

The Morgans belonged to several of the city's exclusive social clubs, including the Omar Khayyam Circle, a black literary and intellectual group which met at the Cambridge home of Maria Baldwin.