Race, Recovery, and Hope

• Published in: TAPA (Society for Classical Studies) 2022-09, Vol.152 (2), p.295-301
• Main Authors: Haley, Shelley P, Murnaghan, Sheila (Bridget)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; African Americans; Autobiographical literature; Black people; Careers; Classical studies; Greek literature; Interiority; Pandemics; Presidents; Race relations; Racial profiling; Racism; Sexism
• ISSN: 2575-7180; 2575-7199; 2575-7199
• DOI: 10.1353/apa.2022.0015

WILLIAM SANDERS SCARBOROUGH AND BLACK CLASSICISM AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (BRIDGET MURNAGHAN) This pair of presidential panels had its origins in discussions among the SCS Board of Directors about how best to acknowledge the shameful incident in 1909 when the APA—as the SCS was then known—met in Baltimore, and William Sanders Scarborough, an eminent Classicist and the President of Wilberforce University, was disinvited from the conference banquet and therefore chose not to attend the conference or deliver his scheduled paper. Michele Valerie Ronnick, Professor of Classics at Wayne State University, a leading expert on Scarborough himself and the editor of his autobiography and collected papers, as well as an energetic pioneer in raising awareness of the rich tradition of Black classicism; Andre Davis, one of Baltimore's foremost Black civic leaders, with a distinguished legal career as a private practitioner, US Attorney, law professor, federal judge, and Baltimore City Solicitor; John W. I. Lee, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of a new book The First Black Archeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert on Scarborough's contemporary, the first Black member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens; and Ashley Hairston, Associate Dean for Academic Advising and University Professor at Wake Forest University, the author of a groundbreaking study of African American classical reception The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West. Imagine, if you can, what it meant to a competent Negro student of Greek literature, W. H. Crogman, to desert his chosen field and write a book entitled The Progress of a Race. Here Franklin gives a lengthy description of William S. Scarborough and notes, "But there was no place for him in American scholarly circles, not even at the predominantly Negro Howard University, where white members of the Board of Trustees took the position that the chair in classical languages could be filled only by a Caucasian" (302).