Richard Alton Graham

Richard Alton Graham (November 6, 1920 – September 24, 2007) was an American equal rights leader, one of the inaugural group of five members of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He was the founding director of the National Teachers Corps. He was also one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), becoming one of its initial officers.

Early life Graham was born in Chicago, Illinois; but he was raised in Lima, Ohio and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces in Iran. After the war, he worked with his father developing a variable speed drive transmission for electric motors. Father and son ran a small manufacturing business in Minominnee, Minnesota, until the younger Graham embarked on a career of public service.

Educational background Graham was awarded a bachelor's degree in engineering from Cornell University in 1942. He earned a master's degree in education from Catholic University in 1970; and he continued his studies, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1972 from what was then the "Union Graduate School", now the Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He would later say he "learned on the job" to become a feminist; and soon became one of the more outspoken commissioners along with the only female member, Aileen Hernandez, a future NOW founder and president. By 1968, the Teacher Corps had expanded into 200 schools; and the program had earned modest bi-partisan support. Graham continued to head the Teacher Corps in the early years of the Nixon administration until early 1971.

In the mid-1970s, he became director of the Center for Moral Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He served as President of Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont (1975–1976); and he helped found the Goddard-Cambridge Center for Social Change.

From the mid-1980s until his death, Graham was an adviser to the Council for Research in Values and Philosophy in Washington, D.C.

Dick Graham married Nancy Aring Graham on December 21, 1949, and enjoyed 57 years of marriage until his death in 2007. Together they raised five children: Peggy Sue (Busy), Charles Louis (Hoey), Richard (Dicker), Nan and John.