The African American Slave Who Grew Up to Write a Greek Textbook
Is a Greco-Roman classical education a critical component of African American advancement from having been a conquered people? Did such an education and mastery challenge ideas about the racial inferiority of people of African descent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century? William Sanders Scarborough thought so. And he was a Black man who had the audacity to write a Greek language textbook.
William Sanders Scarborough (1852–1926) was born an African slave in Macon, Georgia, in the American south. His mother was a slave; his father had been freed by his master. In an environment of terror, degradation, and subordination, he grew up to become perhaps the first African American professional classical scholar. Scarborough as a child witnessed the slave auction block. He was to become a commanding Black intellectual in the Age of Jim Crow lynch law. He also forged an interracial marriage with a divorced white woman Sarah Cordelia Bierce, a fellow educator. Merely, the suggestion of sex across the color line could get Black men killed, with the destiny of being hung from a tree or a face found at the bottom of a well.
Scarborough attended college at Atlanta University, now Clark-Atlanta] (Atlanta, Georgia) and Oberlin College (Oberlin, Ohio). After finishing college, he returned to Macon to teach at Lewis High School, and later married Sarah (who was the school’s principal). Arsonists burned the school to the ground in December 1876, and the fire brigade watched it burn. This was emblematic of the contempt for Black life and empowerment Scarborough knew firsthand. William and Sarah found refuge in Wilberforce Ohio, becoming teachers at Wilberforce University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU).
First Lessons in Greek and Perhaps So Much More.
At times, Scarborough gave lectures at universities graced with memorials of Confederate politicians who made their name defending the slave regime during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and after. His First Lessons in Greek (1881) included Greek-to-English and English-to-Greek exercises that encouraged the practice of Greek grammar and vocabulary building. Xenophon’s Anabasis was the reading offered to test students’ mettle in this great learning endeavor.
We can imagine as we peruse First Lessons on Greek with its many declensions, or grammatical changes of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, something startling. What did it mean for African Americans to learn the Greek letters and vocabulary for the words for honor, virtue, glory, citizen, and soldier? Can we fathom learning the verbs for reading and writing where in most places (or a short time ago) it was illegal to educate the descendants of the enslaved? What about verbs to conquer, conceal, accuse or be silent? Or to enslave, liberate or be free? Barbara Goff, a scholar of West African classical receptions, has suggested that for conquered peoples the Classics could be “a secret language” of empowerment. Undoubtedly this was also true for African American students. It was not inherently an obstacle to self-esteem or the foundation of internalized racism.
Students of Scarborough learned of places like Athens, Abydos (a city in present-day Turkey), and Macedonia, philosophers like Socrates, politicians like Peisistratus or Aristides, and Persian kings such as Cyrus and Darius. They would even learn how to say the words Egypt, tanned skin, and blackness in Greek. This was many years before Ancient Egypt, before Hellenistic colonization, was recognized by many scholars as a Black civilization.
Homer, Thucydides, Euripides, and Aristophanes
Scarborough’s classical studies included scholarship on Homer, Virgil, Caesar, Thucydides, Demosthenes, and Plato. He thought about the meaning of fate and suicide among the classical Greeks. He wrote an analysis of Aristophanes’s comedic play The Birds; this is a story of Pisthetaerus, an Athenian who implores various birds of diverse habitats to create a great city in the sky. Scarborough also examined Iphigenia, a daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra, and thus a princess of Mycenae, the subject of two plays by Euripides (Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris). In an early example of what we now call comparative literature, he also reflected on this goddess as seen by the French playwright Racine and German playwright Goethe. Further, he speculated on the authorship of Andocides’s oration Against Alcibiades. Scarborough wrote popular pieces about the utility of studying Greek and specialized studies of the theory and function of thematic vowels in Greek verbs.
Is An African That Knows Greek Syntax Human?
John C. Calhoun, the famous white supremacist politician from South Carolina and defender of American slavery, was reputed to have said that “if a Negro” could be found who knew “Greek syntax,” then he would admit that people of African descent should be “treated like human beings.” This is one way of thinking about the historical reception of Scarborough’s scholarship on the Greek language. That Scarborough appeared to meet this apparent universal standard and false code of merit was a triumph on one level. However, would Greeks then and now accept the judgment of their humanity and citizenship rights based on their competency in Yoruba or Zulu? It would be seen as peculiar if not an insult. Yet this Black scholar used his mind to break the shackles of a legacy of sadistic brutality and miseducation, using the authority of the Greeks, long before Africana Studies achieved its contemporary institutional authority.
The scholar Lorna Hardwick reminds us that Greco-Roman antiquity does not authorize only one identity, culture, or politics. However, one interpretation of it, during Scarborough’s life and still present among some contemporaries, was a justification of European superiority. While today many are ambivalent or even hostile to the study of ancient Greco-Roman languages (some think they are opposing racism), Scarborough was austere, prideful, and dedicated to his scholarly and professional accomplishments, aware that he had a superior education to most white men not simply ordinary Black people.
Public Citizen and Comparative Linguist
Scarborough was a professor of Classics and later president of Wilberforce University (1908–1920). He was that school’s leading scholar. Among the earliest Black academicians, Scarborough was as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has said “the black scholar’s scholar,” and was as such, a precursor to W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of Black Studies, Pan Africanism, and the modern Civil Rights movement who taught for a short time at Wilberforce.
The diverse themes of Scarborough’s public lectures included reflections on the roles and social status of Black farmers, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, soldiers, and journalists, the education of Black people, the role of Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, Christian theology, and the sociology of deviance, racial conflicts, and rebellion. He also meditated on the personalities and works of Black intellectuals and political leaders from his era including Frederick Douglass, Alexander Dumas, Alexander Pushkin, Bishop Daniel Payne, Henry McNeal Turner, and Booker T. Washington. He also wrote about African American folklore, dialect, and creative writing, as well as about the function of foreign languages and patois in Africa, with comparative notes on Yoruba, Xhosa, and Zulu.
Scarborough was the third African American to join the American Philological Association, and the first to join the Modern Language Association, the latter naming a first-book prize in his honor in 2001. He was a member of the American Spelling Reform Association, the American Social Science Association, the American Foreign Antislavery Society, and the Egyptian Exploration Fund. He was also a Mason of the I. O. Good Templars, and a member of the A.M.E. church. In the church, he was a trustee and longtime editor for the A.M.E. Sunday School Union. He received an LL.D. from the president of Liberia College, and second black member of the American Philological Association, Edward Blyden, in 1882.
He was a participant in the March 5, 1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of his friend Frederick Douglass which founded Alexander Crummell’s American Negro Academy. Scarborough played an active role in the early years of this first major African American learned society, which refuted racist scholarship, promoted black claims to individual, social, and political equality, and studied the history and sociology of African American life. Scarborough gave many lectures throughout the U.S. and frequently corresponded for newspapers and journals including the Christian Register and Christian Recorder, Southern Workman, Forum, African Times and Orient Review, Voice of the Negro, Cleveland Gazette, Transactions of the American Philological Association, Arena, Education, and Independent. In 1921 Scarborough was appointed to a position in the Department of Agriculture in the United States government by President Warren G. Harding, which he held until the end of 1924.
A Dedication Few Can Equal
If Scarborough was a central figure of the African American dialogue with the classics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we know of his life and work from the dedicated scholarship of an unsung scholar few can equal. Michele Valerie Ronnick, Distinguished Professor at Wayne State University, in Detroit, has compiled and published Scarborough’s writings, his autobiography, and his Greek textbook. Yet as a scholar of Classica Africana she has done much more. Emblematic of her own legacy, she created a traveling exhibit in 2003 with the support of the James Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University featuring the photographs of Scarborough and his fellow Black classicists. These portraits which have been exhibited at institutions in small towns and large metropolises in the U.S. and the U.K. have introduced us to new classical scholars.
We now learn of, beside Scarborough, Edward Blyden, Charles H. Boyer, Frazelia Campbell, Helen Maria Chestnut, William Henry Crogman, Orishatuka Faduma, John Wesley Gilbert, James Monroe Gregory, Richard T. Greener, Wiley Lane, George Morton Lightfoot, Reuben Shannon Lovinggood, Lewis Baxter Moore, Pinckney Warren Russell, and Daniel Barclay Williams. This is not a complete list but is ever unfolding through further research.
A word should be said here about Blyden the famous Pan Africanist that tied together the Caribbean (he was a native of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands) and Liberia, West Africa, Gilbert, the first Black archaeologist who did studies in Greece and the Congo, and Faduma, the man from Guyana who went to Sierra Leone and took on a Yoruba name as he taught primarily in North Carolina. The study of the Greco-Roman classics was not an obstacle for them to discover the precolonial African heritage but a gateway. They were forerunners of William Leo Hansberry, who kept notebooks of references to Africa and Africans among the Greco-Roman writers, and Lorenzo Dow Turner, who focused on African languages and creole linguistics, and did studies of how the descendants of the enslaved communicated in the Sea Islands on the South Atlantic coast that have always been an archive of resistance.
A Contemporary Scholarship in His Name
With the support of the Methodist Church Scarborough was able to visit the U.K. and Europe three times. But he was never able to visit his beloved Greece. The American School for Classical Study at Athens, based in the Kolonaki district, recently funded a fellowship in his memory for independent scholars of under-represented groups to walk in the footsteps of antiquity studies that Scarborough was a forerunner.
Not to be outdone, Will Scarborough completed another manuscript: “Questions on Latin Grammar.” His publishers doubted they could profit from it; it was still in his desk drawer when he passed away. The competent authorities of his generation were not concerned to publish equal or superior works by Black scholars, or even acknowledge their humanity. As Ronnick has noted working alone at his desk he experienced a form of liberation ‘through the cultivation of his own intellect.’ Although Scarborough’s works were rarely cited, or sighted for that matter, across the color line, he never stopped his studies. He had his Homer, Virgil, and oh yes, these new studies of the Gullah-Geechee dialect among southern coastal African Americans to keep his attention. Out of these studies later emerged the recognition of African vocabulary and cultural survivals among the descendants of the enslaved, a field that is still “Greek” to many.
