African American Classicists

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1 Amy Schrepfer-Tarter Dr. Gordon African American Classicists African American Education Final Project I. Background Information The tradition of African American classicists is central to the study of classics, and more specifically Latin. African Americans have made invaluable contributions to classical scholarship, in large and small ways, many through their time in academia and the students that they taught. Some African Americans who made a contribution to the field did so by their politics, their rhetoric, or their activism, as some of the examples in the table will show. In particular, past scholarship on African Americans in the classics has focused on 12 or 13 people of note, though they certainly are not the only important African Americans to have been involved in the study of Greek and Latin and should not be the only ones included in these activities. For more information on the specific 12, including those whose pictures are part of the 12 Black Classicists Exhibits, see the bibliography. They are all scholars of the classics, though what they did with their ancient world knowledge varies. The table below gives the names of some famous classicists. It is important to note that the list below is not exhaustive, with respect to people or information. It is intended to be a jumping off point for students (or teachers ) research, as both often find it easier to embark on research when they have a small amount of information readily available with which to begin their search and ensure that they are studying the correct individual. 1

2 Name George Morton Lightfoot Helen Maria Chesnutt Short Biography He was a professor of Latin at Howard University and began the Classical Club there. His area of interest was Roman satire. There is a scholarship named for him at Howard. She earned a B.A. from Smith and an M.A. in Latin from Columbia. She also co-authored Latin textbook. She taught Latin in Cleveland at Central High School, where one of her notable students was Langston Hughes. John Wesley Gilbert Wiley Lane William Sanders Scarborough Edward Wilmot Blyden Richard Theodore Greener Born to slaves, Gilbert received his B.A. and M.A. in Greek from Brown University. He was the first African American to study at the American School in Athens. He also taught Greek at Paine College. Lane graduated from Amherst College and went on to be a Professor of Greek at Howard. He was the first African American to serve as a professor in that department. He was eulogized by Fredrick Douglass. Though born a slave, Scarborough earned a B.A. and M.A. from Oberlin. He was a well regarded Greek scholar and produced a Greek textbook to much acclaim. He was also the president of Wilberforce University. Blyden taught as a professor of Classics at Liberia College, after fleeing the United States when he could not gain admission to Rutgers Theological College. He was known for his classically inspired love of oratory. Greener was the first African American to get a B.A. 2

3 James Monroe Gregory William Henry Crogman Reuben Shannon Lovinggood John Chavis (earlier time period) W.E.B. DuBois Frazelia Campell from Harvard University. In 1875, he was the first African American to join the American Philological Association. He worked as a professor, lawyer, and diplomat. Graduated from Howard and then spent time teaching Latin there. One of the foundational members of the American Philological Association. Crogman was a president of Clark University. Before that, he was a professor of Greek at Clark. He taught himself Latin and Greek before going to college. Lovinggood started the classics department at Huston College in Texas. Before that, he worked at Wiley College in the Department of Classics and graduated from Clark. Despite being born into slavery in 1763, he was the first African American to attend, and possibly graduate, from Princeton. He later became a nationally recognized scholar of Latin and Greek. During his life he served for 3 years in the Revolutionary War and was considered to be the most educated African American in the nation at the time. He also worked as a preacher. He was the first African American to graduate with Ph.D. from Harvard. He began studying Latin and Greek during high school and continued throughout college. Later went on to be a well known activist, author, and co-founder of the NAACP. Teacher of Latin, German, and Spanish. Graduated from the Institure for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. Worked as an academic, as a school administrator and teacher at the high school and college levels. 3

4 Lewis Baxter Moore Daniel Barclay Williams Lucy Craft Laney Recipient of one of the first Ph.D s awared to an African American in the United States in 1896 from the University of Pennsylvania. Taught Latin at Howard University, where he also worked as an administrator. Worked as a Professor of Ancient Languages at Virginia State, after attending and graduating from Brown University. At the time, it was the only state institution allowing African Americans to be educated in the classics. Born in 1854, she could read Latin by the time she was 12 years old. She graduated as part of the first class at Atlanta University, despite her upset about not being able to take classics because it was forbidden for women. She later became a well respected teacher and founded a local NAACP chapter. She taught such well known people as W.E.B. DuBois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Langston Hughes. Traditionally, classicists are thought of as being Caucasian, upper middle class, and northern. One of the primary reasons that this lesson is important is to showcase to students that Latin and Classics need not be solely the property of Caucasians. In fact, the historically black colleges and universities of the South created a strong tradition of teaching Latin, Greek, and the Classics starting in the 1850 s and moving into the present day. There were a number of reasons for this. One is that knowledge of Latin and Greek was historically considered a status symbol in the United States, so studying them brought cultural capital. Through this cultural capital, African Americans could become 4

5 more well respected in the intellectual community. Many of the examples in the chart above used their knowledge of the classics to begin and run schools, run university classics programs, and bring education to other African Americans. Another reason that studying the classics was valued is that there has always been a strong connection between the ancient Roman and Greek world and Northern regions of Africa, some of which were Roman provinces during the height of the empire, so African Americans found themselves simultaneously studying the world of their forefathers and cultures that bought them intellectual entre into the intellectual world of the United States. The purpose of these lessons is to demonstrate to students that Latin and Greek, and more generally the ancient world, have never been solely the purview of Caucasian, intellectual males, even though it is obvious that they have dominated the history books and continue to dominate the field. But the classics have served an important role in the African American community. African American classicists did not always go into universities and colleges, but used their Latin and Greek knowledge in different ways. Their contributions to education, and by extension society, cannot be overestimated. 5

6 II. Activities A. African American Classicist Persona Project Overview: For this project, you will take on the persona of one your assigned African American classicist. It is your job to know everything that you possibly can about your subject, from a brief biographical sketch to their particular scholarly interests, focusing on what part of the classical world they were interested in and why. After the research period, you will be interviewed, as your figure, in front of the class, in a 60 minutes type interview. You will not be provided with questions beforehand, but you should expect that there will be some standard facts that the questions will focus on, such as: -dates of birth, death, basic information about the time period -education level achieved, places studied -relation to the study of classics -publications, speeches, or other communications about classics -challenges faced during study of classics, education My classicist is: My library research date is: My interview date is: *Remember that there will be a quiz after all of the interviews are completed. To that end, you need to make sure that the information that you present is clear, coherent, 6

7 and complete. You also need to take good notes during the presentations, so that you can revisit them as a means of studying for the test. Grading: There will be three components to this project. I. Research Your research notes will be checked twice during the library days. You may keep them in any format you want, PROVIDED THAT THEY ARE NOT SIMPLY PHOTOCOPIES FROM A BOOK. You will also need to turn in a completed bibliography to me on the day of your interview. It can be in MLA or APA format. For more information on formatting, please see the librarian or me for a bibliographic reference sheet. II. Interview During the class interview days, you will be interviewed while taking on the persona of your subject. That means that you must answer questions in the way that they would, with the knowledge of their lives that they had. I will ask you questions based mainly around the five points listed above in the instructions. You may not have extensive notes, but you may have one 3x5 index card with key facts on it. You may not read off of the card for the entire interview and make sure that the key facts are organized in such a way that you will not have to go searching for them. Expect 7

8 that the interview will take at least 10 minutes. Bonus points will be given for costumes. III. Quiz The quiz will be fill in the blank and matching, based on the interviews conducted in class. FOR THIS REASON, YOU ARE EXPECTED TO TAKE NOTES DURING THE PRESENTATION. Note taking sheets will be provided. B. Rhetorical Analysis Day This day is an opportunity for students to read speeches, notes, or small passages written by the classicists, educators, and activists that they studied during the Persona Project. Read aloud from these sources and then have students brainstorm, on a large piece of butcher paper or on the board, what they hear that reminds them of Latin, Greek, or their studies on oratory. Afterwards, discuss the what they heard, what you heard, and what commentators/editors have said about these works. 8

9 C. African Influence in the Classical World Just as the classics influenced African Americans fighting for intellectual equality, Africa also impacted the ancient world. Using the following terms as guides, create an information fair for the class, with stations developing each concept of how the African world influenced the ancient world. Additionally, try tying each of these concepts into information that you ve learned about the interests of African American Classicists. Carthage The Library at Alexandria Cult of Isis The Pharaohs The Punic Wars Mediterranean Shipping Cleopatra Tunis Aeneas and Africa Minoan Art Hannibal African Mystic Cults Numidia Alexander and North Africa Berber kingdoms Libya Mauretania The Ptolemys Timgad Garamantes Setif 9

10 D. Present Day Connection Ideas Because of geographical, financial, and time constraints which vary from school to school and may influence the resources available for travel, the following are some ideas about how to tie the historical aspects already covered to the modern day. *Contact a local classics department at a college of university and ask to have a speaker come in to discuss why and how African Americans, past and present, have influenced the field. *Take a field trip to a museum, such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., or the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to examine their classical art collections. Then look at their African art collections. What similarities do the students see? What differences do they see? *Continue to the study of Egypt that is touched on in section C. Extend back in time, before Roman and Greek influence, and study native Egyptian culture. How was it changed by Rome and Greece? How does it fit into Africa today? *Create a web showing how each of the classicists outlined in the lessons have influenced schools and colleges. Build the web outward to show who or what those schools and colleges have influenced. This would be an excellent bulletin board or classroom wall activity, as it could demonstrate to students the connections between the past and the present educational systems. 10

11 III. Bibliography Becker, T.H. (2000). A source for ideology: The classical education of Martin Luther King. Classical Bulletin, 76, Becker, T. H. (2001). Broadening Access to a Classical Education: State Universities in Virginia in the Nineteenth Century. Classical Journal, 96, 3, Bilger, B. (1997). The Last Black Classicist: The world's leading authority on race in antiquity, Frank M. Snowden Jr. insists the ancient Egyptians weren't black. Sciences, 37, 2, Brandenburg, P. (2008). William Scarborough : A black classicist in the United States The autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough : An American journey from slavery to scholarship, Michele Valerie Ronnick (Ed.) Scholia :Studies in Classical Antiquity, 17, Brucia, M. (2001). The African-American Poet, Jupiter Hammon: A Home-born Slave and his Classical Name. International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 7, Dodson, A. (2003). Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African-American Theatre. Black Issues Book Review, 5, 3. Douglass, F., & O'Meally, R. G. (2003). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Classics. Fikes, R. (2002a). African-American Scholars of Greco-Roman Culture. Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 35, Fikes, R. J. (2002b). It Was Never Greek to Them: Black Affinity for Ancient Greek and 11

12 Roman Culture. Negro Educational Review, 53, Goff, B. E., & Simpson, M. (2007). Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and dramas of the African diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goings, K. W., & O'Connor, E. M. (2010). Lessons learned: the role of the classics at black colleges and universities.(report). Journal of Negro Education, 79, 4, Lum, L. (July 01, 2005). Careers in the Classics. Black Issues in Higher Education, 22, 11, Rankine, P. D. (2006). Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, classicism, and African American literature. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press. Ronnick, M. V. (1997). Three Nineteenth-century Classicists of African Descent. Scholia: Studies in Classical Antiquity, 6, Ronnick, M. V. (2002). The African American Classicist William Sanders Scarborough ( ) and the Early Days of CAMWS. Classical Journal, 97, 3, Ronnick, M. V. (2004). Twelve black classicists. Arion, 11(3), Ronnick, M. V. (2010). African-American classicist William Sanders Scarborough and the 1921 film of the Oresteia at Cambridge University. Comparative Drama, Scarborough, W. S., & Ronnick, M. V. (2005). The autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough : An American journey from slavery to scholarship. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Scarborough, W. S., & Ronnick, M. V. (2006). The works of William Sanders Scarborough: Black classicist and race leader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 12

13 Strauss, B. (2006). The Black Phalanx: African-Americans and the Classics after the Civil War. Arion: a Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 12, 3, Walters, T. L. (2007). African American literature and the classicist tradition : Black women writers from Wheatley to Morrison. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. West, William C. (2000). Socrates as a Model of Civil Disobedience in the Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Classical Bulletin 76, Wetmore, K. J. (2002). The Athenian sun in an African sky: Modern African adaptations of classical Greek tragedy. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland. Wetmore, K. J. (2003). Black Dionysus: Greek tragedy and African American theatre. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co. 13

Mary Church Terrell. Biography. Quick Facts. * * African American writer, activist, and lecturer * A founder of the Colored Women s League

Mary Church Terrell. Biography. Quick Facts. * * African American writer, activist, and lecturer * A founder of the Colored Women s League The world is indebted more to the square inch to meddlers than any other species of the genus homo. Instead of being an oasis in a desert of uninhabitable planets, the earth would be a howling wilderness