The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship

By Michele Valerie Ronnick, William Sanders Scarborough and Henry Louis Gates

"If W.E.B Du Bois, the antecedent of today’s black public intellectuals, himself has an antecedent, it is W. S. Scarborough, the black scholar’s scholar." – Henry Louis Gates Jr.
This illuminating autobiography traces Scarborough's path out of slavery in Macon, Georgia, to a prolific scholarly career that culminated with his presidency of Wilberforce University. Despite the racism he met as he struggled to establish a place in higher education for African Americans, Scarborough was an exemplary scholar, particularly in the field of classical studies. He was the first African American member of the Modern Language Association, a forty-four-year member of the American Philological Association, and a true champion of higher education. Scarborough advocated the reading, writing, and teaching of liberal arts at a time when illiteracy was rampant due to slavery's legacy, white supremacists were dismissing the intellectual capability of blacks, and Booker T. Washington was urging African Americans to focus on industrial skills and training.

The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough is a valuable historical record of the life and work of a pioneer who helped formalize the intellectual tradition of the black scholar. Michele Valerie Ronnick contextualizes Scarborough's narrative through extensive notes and by exploring a wide variety of sources such as census records, church registries, period newspapers, and military and university records. This book is indispensable to anyone interested in the history of intellectual endeavor in America, Africana studies and classical studies, in particular, as well as those familiar with the associations and institutions that welcomed and valued Scarborough.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780814348895

Book preview

Cover Page for The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough

The Autobiography of

William Sanders Scarborough

AFRICAN AMERICAN LIFE SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at http://wsupress.wayne.edu

SERIES EDITORS

Melba Joyce Boyd

Department of Africana Studies

Wayne State University

Ronald Brown

Department of Political Science

Wayne State University

The Autobiography of

William Sanders Scarborough

An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship

Edited with an Introduction by

Michele Valerie Ronnick

Foreword by

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Wayne State University Press Detroit

Copyright © 2005 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. First paperback edition © 2021. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3225-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-3224-5 (jacketed cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8143-4889-5 (ebook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Scarborough, W. S. (William Sanders), 1852–1926.

The autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough : an American journey from slavery to scholarship / edited and with an introduction by Michele Valerie Ronnick ; foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

p. cm.—(African American life series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8143-3224-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Scarborough, W. S. (William Sanders), 1852–1926. 2. African Americans—Biography. 3. African American scholars—Biography. 4. African American college presidents—Biography. 5. Classicists—United States—Biography. 6. Wilberforce University—Biography. 7. Slaves—Georgia—Macon—Biography. 8. African Americans—Intellectual life—19th century. 9. African Americans—Intellectual life—20th century. 10. Classical philology—Study and teaching—United States. I. Ronnick, Michele V. II. Title. III. Series.

E185.97.S28A3 2005

973ʹ.0496073ʹ0092—dc22 2004011624

Published with support from the Arthur L. Johnson Fund for African American Studies.

Wayne State University Press rests on Waawiyaataanong, also referred to as Detroit, the ancestral and contemporary homeland of the Three Fires Confederacy. These sovereign lands were granted by the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot nations, in 1807, through the Treaty of Detroit. Wayne State University Press affirms Indigenous sovereignty and honors all tribes with a connection to Detroit. With our Native neighbors, the press works to advance educational equity and promote a better future for the earth and all people.

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Visit us online at wsupress.wayne.edu

For my mother, Elizabeth Ann Ronnick, and my father, Albert Jacob Ronnick

(1903–1995)

Ad astra per aspera

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

I. Parentage

II. Boyhood Days

III. Macon and Atlanta School Days

IV. Four Years in Oberlin College

V. Seeking a Path

VI. The Path Found

VII. Widening Fields—Working, Learning, Growing

VIII. Authorship—Greek Book—Marriage

IX. Philology and Politics

X. Philology and Other Literary Work

XI. In Politics and Magazines

XII. In Payne Seminary and at a Southern University

XIII. At the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the Columbian Exposition

XIV. Friends and Helpers—Deaths

XV. Back to the Classical Professorship and a Vice Presidency

XVI. First European Trip—Delegate to the Third Methodist Ecumenical Conference—London, 1901

XVII. Miscellaneous Activities

XVIII. Made President of Wilberforce University

XIX. Second Trip to Europe—Delegate to the First Universal Races Congress—[A] Rhine Trip

XX. Labors for Wilberforce University—Incidents

XXI. Trips—South, West, and East

XXII. World War I Work

XXIII. Local and Closing War Labors

XXIV. Close of Forty-five Years in the Field of Education

XXV. Third Visit to Europe—Again Delegate to the Methodist Ecumenical Conference in London—Scotland—Continental Trip

XXVI. A New Field of Labor

XXVII. Retirement from Public Life—Fiftieth Anniversary of Oberlin’s Class of 1875

XXVIII. Looking Backward and Forward

XXIX. The End [Mrs. Scarborough’s Record of Professor Scarborough’s Last Days]

Notes

Archival Materials: A Selected Source List

Index

Acknowledgments

I have accumulated numerous debts of gratitude to people, stateside and abroad, for their contributions to my effort to bring William Sanders Scarborough back to life. I have been assisted as well by casual conversations with strangers whose names I never learned while chatting in used book stores or standing over copy machines in libraries.

For materials in archives and elsewhere, I am much obliged to Candace Pryor and Latoyra Weston at the Interlibrary Loan Department and Mike Hawthorne, senior clerk, of Purdy-Kresge Library at Wayne State University; Brenda B. Square at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University; Scott Sanders at Antioch College; Cathy Lynn Mundale and Karen Jefferson at the Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta; Steven Tomlinson at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Sheila Darrow at the Hallie Quinn Brown Library, Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio; Sarah Hartwell at the Rayner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College; Leonard Ballou (1926–2004) at Elizabeth City State University, North Carolina; Joseph Greer at the Green County Public Library, Xenia, Ohio; an unknown hero at the William R. and Norma B. Harvey Library, Hampton University, Virginia; Andrea B. Goldstein and Susan Halpert at the Houghton Library and the Harvard University Archives; Ida Jones, Joellen El Bashir, and Clifford L. Muse, Jr., at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; John Hodgson at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, England; Diane Shaw at the David Bishop Skillman Library, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania; Muriel McDowell Jackson at the Genealogical and Historical Room, Middle Georgia Regional Library, Macon; Sue Parker and Floyd Thomas at the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, Wilberforce, Ohio; Walter B. Hill at the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D. C.; John Aubrey of the Newberry Library, Chicago; Roland M. Baumann and Ken Grossi of the Mudd Center Library, Oberlin College; Eva M. Greenberg at the Oberlin Pubic Library, Ohio; Elizabeth L. Plummer, Thomas J. Rieder, and Mathew Benz at the Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; Terri Nelson at the Princeton Public Library; Diana Lachatanere at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; Kitty Oliver and Chris Howard at the Sidney Lanier Cottage, Macon, Georgia; Cynthia Wilson of the Tuskegee University Archives; Michael McCormick and Anne Sindelar at the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland; and Jean Mulhern, Jacqueline Brown, and Linda Hasting of the Rembert E. Stokes Library, Wilberforce University.

For scholarly support and technical advice, I am indebted to the following at Wayne State University: Norma and Bernard Goldman; Walter F. Edwards, director of the Humanities Center; Alfred Cobbs; Guy Stern; Robert Sedler of the School of Law; Todd Duncan, Pariedeau Mars; Murray Jackson (1926–2002); and Sarah Miller. My thanks also to Jane Hoehner, Kathryn Wildfong, and Adela Garcia of Wayne State University Press and to Melba Joyce Boyd and Ron Brown, editors of the African American Life Series. I also thank Dr. Irvin D. Reid, president of Wayne State University, who suggested that I bring this manuscript to Wayne State University Press. Many thanks also to Nancy Skowronski, Peter Gulewich, and Conrad Welsing of the Detroit Public Library for support of this work.

I am also grateful to Craig Bertolet and Robin Sabino of Auburn University; Meyer Reinhold (1909–2002) and Herb Golder of Boston University; Joan Bryant of Brandeis University; Joseph D. Lewis of Central State University; James Tatum of Dartmouth College; David Bright, Randall K. Burkett, and Mark Sanders of Emory University; Titus Brown of Florida A & M University; Jim O’Donnell of Georgetown University; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Richard Newman (1930–2003), Zeph Stewart, and Richard Thomas of Harvard University; John Quinn of Hope College; Carrie Cowherd of Howard University; John Curran of Marquette University; Vincent Caretta and Judith Hallet of the University of Maryland; Kevin Gaines, James Jackson, Elizabeth James, Richard Janko, Jim Porter, Sarah Rappe, and John Woodford of the University of Michigan; Dolan Hubbard of Morgan State University; William Dominik of the University of Otago, New Zealand; Andrew Feldherr, Nell Painter, Valerie Smith, and Cornel West of Princeton University; Patrice Rankine of Purdue University; Ward W. Briggs, Jr., and Michael Mounter of the University of South Carolina; Margaret Wade-Lewis of State University of New York at New Paltz; Charles Blockson of the Blockson Collection, Temple University; Mark Farmer of Valparaiso University; Lucious Edwards of Virginia State University; and Muriel Brailey of Wilberforce University.

To my friends who have encouraged me along the way, I say I couldn’t have done it without you! These are Timothy Taffe; Kevin G. Piotrowski and family; Steve Erickson; Melvin McCray; Bruce Roffi; Marilynn Rashid; Mrs. Lewis T. Bennett and family; Howard Finley; Christine Allen-Bruno and family; Sara and Reggie Wilcox; Truman Kella Gibson, Jr.; Joseph and Marina Palmeri and family; John Russ; Rhonda Collier; Dennis Dickerson; William Robinson, Jr.; George Davis, II; Cully Sommers; Gene R. Stephenson; Suesetta Talbert McCree; Sheila Gregory Thomas; Ralph Luker; Mary Ann Rodriquez; Lisa Ruch; Donna Jones; Adelaide Cromwell; Ruth Wright Hayre; Delores Wright; Leni Sorensen; and Sarah A. Grant, great-granddaughter of Mrs. Scarborough. I am also very grateful to students at Wayne State University who have responded with warmth and enthusiasm to my work.

For putting the manuscript on computer disk, I must acknowledge the contributions of Natalie Carter and Charles Alexander; and for help in getting the manuscript in shape, Jennifer Backer, an incomparable copyeditor, and Dorothy Hadfield, a wonder-working indexer. I am especially grateful to Joe D. Kieleszewski, the College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of Classics, Greek, and Latin at Wayne State University for providing funds to produce the index.

Finally I thank the members of my family circle: my mother, Elizabeth Ronnick; my brothers, Michael William Ronnick and David Louis Ronnick; my sister-in-law Holly Hoodenpyle Ronnick; my niece, Anna Klein Michaeli, and her husband, Eitan; Kevin L. Perry; and Henrietta Coon and her children, Nathan, Caroline, and Gregory.

Foreword

Recently, I told a colleague that Phillis Wheatley is hot. An African-born slave in Revolutionary America, Wheatley wrote dozens of poems that betrayed a learned understanding of the classics—so learned that her authorship was called into question by Boston’s intellectual elite (let’s forget for a moment, if we can, the question of how she learned to read and write). Wheatley submitted to a grueling examination by late-eighteenth-century Boston’s literary lights, who were ultimately satisfied that this black teenage girl had indeed written the poems she claimed to have written. Wheatley’s authorship was legitimated and her intellect authenticated. Still, she died around age thirty, free but in poverty. My colleagues and I have worked for years to restore her to a place in the African American canon, and indeed, to the American literary canon.

It is a measure of our success in doing so that not only are films being proposed about Wheatley but that people are coming out of the woodwork now, family genealogies in hand, claiming Wheatley as their own. To do so means, of course, that these same people—generally northerners who are not used to thinking of themselves as descended from slaveholders—must come to terms with their slaveholding ancestry. But come to terms they will if it means they can claim Wheatley as a part of their own family—an enslaved part, but a part nonetheless.

William Sanders Scarborough is long overdue for an act of similar restoration. The first-time publication of his autobiography, shepherded for years by Michele Valerie Ronnick, Associate Professor of Classics, Greek, and Latin at Wayne State University in Detroit, is the first step in this restoration. Born a slave on February 16, 1852, in Macon, Georgia, Scarborough had become the nation’s preeminent black classicist by the time of his death in 1926. A professor, textbook author, and university president, Scarborough was a groundbreaking figure whose career, in Ronnick’s words, marks the advent of the professional African American intellectual willing and able to make a lifetime commitment to the academy.

This may seem like rarefied stuff. Although active in public life as well (he served on the General Committee of the NAACP in its early years, was a member of the American Negro Academy, and was a spokesman for African American Republicans in Ohio, for instance), Scarborough must be remembered primarily as the third man of African descent to become a member of the American Philological Association, in 1882, and its first lifetime black member, as well as the first to join the newly formed Modern Language Association, in 1884. He attended philological conferences, published papers, and taught Greek and Latin at a university; in other words, he did the work that a professional academic does. But if the study of the classics seems marginalized today, it must be remembered that in the late nineteenth century this field was the measure of erudition and the quality of one’s education. The emphasis on the classics in the American curriculum was a legacy of Europe, and to have a black man succeed in this field of study meant that another legacy was upended: the Western idea that blacks did not possess the intellectual capacity to learn. Scarborough, the member of many scholarly societies, was a learned man who effectively rebuked prevalent theories of African intellectual inferiority and cultural primitivism, as Phillis Wheatley had done one hundred years earlier with her poems.

Scarborough lived, studied, and taught during a period when theories of college education were shifting from a classical learnedness to a modern practicality, from a celebration of scholarship to an emphasis on vocation. His adherence to the value of the classics as a scholarly foundation for the discipline, hard work, and industry necessary for success in the American economy put him in stark opposition to one of the most dominant black figures of his day, Booker T. Washington, whose program for practical education—skip the classics and go straight to the discipline, hard work, and industry—came to overshadow Scarborough’s in the early decades of the twentieth century. Ronnick tells us that by the early 1920s the classics were virtually eliminated from educational training for blacks (a trend seen also, but to a lesser degree, among whites). When Scarborough died in 1926, the classics lost their best-known and most eloquent African American defender.

If a New York Times obituary is a good measure of fame, or at least public importance, Scarborough did not die in obscurity. The Times noted the uniqueness of his contribution, referring to him as the first member of his race to prepare a Greek textbook suitable for university use. But just as the classics passed out of general American awareness, so, too, did Scarborough, who has long been an invisible player in an arena dominated by the formidable figures of Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.

With the rise of black studies in the 1960s and the establishment of departments of African American studies in the decades following, a conservative figure such as Scarborough could get lost, or mistaken for a scholarly Uncle Tom who immersed himself as much as possible in the world of white academia. Starched collars and Greek grammars, after all, would seem to have little relevance to the study of African American contributions to the life of the nation. However, what we forget by forgetting Scarborough is his radical act of self-fashioning: a former slave became a professor through force of will, through a determination to use his intellect rather than his brute strength as a means of defining his position in American life. Were it not for Scarborough, the first professional black classicist, it is conceivable that the departments that have spent many years ignoring him would not exist: he provides a model for African Americans’ formal entry into and full participation in the academy. If his story is highly individualized and even atypical, it is also a larger story of the authentication and recognition of the African American as an intellectual being.

Ronnick’s brilliant achievement in rejoining Scarborough with his public is, happily, not isolated. The past several years have seen a number of scholars, including myself, going back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finding copious evidence of African American intellectual activity and contribution. But it is, nonetheless, a stunning act of recovery. With The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough, Ronnick invites us to engage with the radical thinker and activist who has too long been thought of—if he has been thought of at all—as a fusty Victorian gentleman who acted white. Although not the norm, Scarborough was in fact a standard.

Finally, it is worth noting that, in 2001, the Modern Language Association instituted the William Sanders Scarborough Prize, awarded to an outstanding scholarly study of black American literature or culture. Although it is unlikely that a grammar in his beloved Greek or Latin could take this prize, Scarborough would take comfort in knowing that the organization in which he was a groundbreaking member now offers him a distinction that few of its other members can claim. It is also worth noting that this volume and Ronnick’s herculean labors to bring her fellow classicist back to life will enrich us for years to come.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Introduction

This is a study in transgression and transcendence. It is the self-portrait of a black man born in slavery who broke through a nexus of biased cultural assumption to reach the self-actuated state of full personhood. It is the story of a man who experienced his first liberation through the cultivation of his own intellect at a time when education for members of his race was interdicted by law. And finally, it is a blow-by-blow account of his heroic struggle to rise above seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to stand upright in the formal dress of civilized life with his humanity authenticated.

Accident of birth placed William Sanders Scarborough in a place, in a time, and in a bodily form that regarded him as a warm-blooded machine to be bought and sold with the livestock and worked like a two-handed engine, as John Milton might have described it. But his unflagging commitment to self-betterment, his dauntless courage, and his untarnished nobility of purpose—each founded on the bedrock of support of his faith, friends, and family—determined otherwise. The young Scarborough, suffused with an inborn affection for arts and letters, was destined for a different way of life. He had great ambitions for himself and for his race. And his egregious efforts would bring him great acclaim.

Issues of domination, control, and denial vis-à-vis race, gender, and class (and what is currently called identity politics) were raised to the second power in Scarborough’s case. He quickly learned in this doubled universe to negotiate together and apart the stratifications in black society and in white society, first in the South and then in the North, and later in Europe. Throughout it all his unquenchable thirst for learning remained atypical Negro behavior. In the eyes of the general public a learned black man was a walking oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, both preposterous and frightening. Learned in that time meant having a command of the classical languages—Greek and Latin. This was part and parcel of the university experience. Black people rarely received such training, and when they did they were rarely accepted. Their presence was unsettling to others—both black and white—and they were marginalized. Their claims to learning, when not wholly disregarded or pronounced fraudulent, were overly scrutinized. Grotesque caricatures such as Mark Twain’s mulatter college professor and James Corrothers’s Black Cat Club demagogues were examples of such ridicule. The roots of this belittlement go back to the eighteenth century. Then, David Hume likened the Latinity of the free black Jamaican Francis Williams (ca. 1700–ca. 1770) to a parrot’s ability to imitate human speech in his essay Of National Character (1754). In Boston, the slave Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) was compelled to prove her command of literature and her knowledge of classical poetry in live demonstrations. Williams and Wheatley survived their ordeals, but they were dismissed as exotic oddities, freakish untouchables, and then forgotten.¹ Their senior years were spent in obscurity. And there the matter lay, dormant for decades.

But the perplexing and threatening idea of a learned person of African descent who could read Greek and Latin did not disappear. It came back with renewed energy a century later as post–Civil War America dealt with the challenge of educating thousands of newly freed slaves. This was a situation without precedent, one that affected every aspect of American life and precipitated a national identity crisis. Who should (or would, for that matter) teach these people? Many of them were full-grown adults. What system or timetable could be set to effect this? Who would pay for this? Where could the work be done? And finally—the most important question of all—what should these people study? The humane literature of classical antiquity, or practical things such as technical skills and methods of farming? The decisions made during those years concerning the appropriate curriculum for these new citizens, the African American freedmen, had tremendous consequences. The solution to some of today’s problems, paramount among them the conundrum presented by the black egghead, who is ridiculed for his studious habits and branded as a sellout acting white, lies in an understanding of what happened in this period.

Historical Background

For centuries in Europe a classical education was the requisite training for any person who wished to participate or move forward in the enterprises of the Western world. But with the Age of Enlightenment came elements of doubt. Eighteenth-century American educators and intellectuals, products of the earlier tradition, were influenced by new trends of skepticism, and they keenly argued over the reasons for and against the study of Greek and Latin. Francis Bacon’s idea that knowledge must be pursued for its utility and social support held sway among them. Much energy was spent trying to figure out whether any manner of what they called useful knowledge could come from the study of ancient languages.² In 1768 William Livingston, the first governor of New Jersey, scoffed at the idea that training in the classics would be any help in clearing the wilderness for farming. With him were other anti-classicists such as Thomas Paine, Francis Hopkinson, Benjamin Franklin, and Benjamin Rush, who concluded that there was no place for dead languages in the new republic. On the other side was a large group that included such men as Rush’s friend John Adams, James Logan, and James Madison, who were keenly interested in the study of classical antiquity and ancient languages, and Thomas Jefferson, who felt that the classical languages provided a firm foundation if not an ornament to most types of study.³

The debate among this group of elite white men was never resolved, and the problem was compounded when the question of the classical curriculum was asked in regard to real outsiders such as women, Jews, and blacks. In the latter case questions of racial inferiority and accusations of inherited mental inadequacy dating back to earlier times rose to the surface.⁴ With isolated exceptions such as Williams, Wheatley, and later Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), who studied Greek from 1846 to 1853 at Cambridge University, the opportunity for African Americans in significant numbers to obtain traditional liberal arts training in classics really began at the end of the Civil War, reaching its peak at the turn of the century. While many black Americans made it their life ambition to achieve economic independence and material gain—principles that have been so closely associated with the name Booker T. Washington, as to seem not only synonymous but exclusively his own today—other black Americans hungrily devoured the bread of Knowledge, as Frederick Douglass put it. These people, the advance guard of what DuBois would later call the Talented Tenth, wanted to learn everything and eagerly embraced all aspects of the classical curriculum, which had been the universal standard for white people.

Two camps formed—or seemed to. This division was affirmed to the white mind when men such as the Massachusetts reformer Samuel J. Barrows in 1891 declared in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly that two aristocracies are appearing in the colored race—the aristocracy of culture and the aristocracy of wealth.⁵ This artificial—not to mention illogical—dichotomy was anti-intellectual and anti-communitarian. And although Barrows thought he saw culture and prosperity coming together among the younger generation, the two ideas took separate courses. Promulgated by the popular press and placed in the collective consciousness, the split caught on. It said in short that a black person had one of two paths to follow: the thoughtful, cultured, and ultimately impractical path of the classically based liberal arts curriculum or the utilitarian path of technical and manual training. This separatist theory was soon put into practice across the country, and the two programs were treated as if they were mutually exclusive.

Students, civic leaders, politicians, educators, and philanthropists were forced to choose. The philanthropists were by no means united, and because the philanthropic endeavors were supported by three different groups (faith-based missionaries, Northern industrialists, and the black community), conflicts arose over many issues. As time passed the polyphony of voices participating in the debate receded from memory and a few figures came to the fore as the spokesmen for the two camps. Contributions of men like Scarborough were forgotten while Booker T. Washington, the pragmatist, and DuBois, the theoretician, took center stage and have held it ever since. By the 1920s the progressive educational program that sought to eliminate the useless, ancient languages from the curriculum had taken hold, and the historically black colleges and universities, which at their outset offered many opportunities for training in the classics, changed direction entirely.⁶ Classical departments were eliminated, and the sole surviving department is housed at Howard University.⁷

The study of this phenomenon—the examination of what caused it, what destroyed it, and what impact it has had on the present intellectual, economic, social, and racial life of this country—has rarely attracted the attention of scholars from either classics or African American studies.⁸ The intellectual community has either been satisfied with the work of classical scholars such as Frank Snowden or Lloyd Thompson, who have focused their studies on evidence found in the ancient civilizations of Europe, Africa, and the Near East, or they have been engrossed in the fiery debate between the Sinologist Martin Bernal and the Hellenist Mary Lefkowitz, which has sunk into a quagmire of tribalism and personalized argument immersed in a struggle for cultural hegemony.⁹

William Sanders Scarborough’s life (1852–1926) forces us to look beyond these perspectives and examine things from a different and, in fact, mutually beneficial angle. He commands us to consider the development of black classicism, a concept I termed Classica Africana in 1996.¹⁰ The name is patterned after the book Classica Americana (1984) by Meyer Reinhold, who studied the impact of the classics on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. This new subfield of the classical tradition, Classica Africana, explores an area overlooked by Reinhold and examines the undeniable impact, both positive and negative, that the Graeco-Roman heritage has had on people of African descent in their creative and professional endeavors. Nineteenth-century African American rhetoric, for example, is suffused with classical topoi and it abounds with intertextual references to the thoughts of both pagan and Christian writers. No modern scholar can gain a full understanding of its meaning, design, or cultural and intellectual impact without taking the classical tradition and its pedagogical transmission into account.

If one considers a small but exemplary sample, made manifest by the following careers, a pattern quickly emerges. In Europe there were men of African descent, such as Juan Latino (1516–c. 1601), Latin scholar in Granada, and Anthony William Amo (1703–c. 1760), who wrote a dissertation on a legal topic in Latin in Amsterdam and later became a lecturer at the University of Wittenberg. In the New World, there were those with roots in the Caribbean besides Francis Williams such as Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912), who taught Greek at Liberia College and corresponded with Gladstone about Homer, or Derek Walcott (1931–) and his well-known work, Omeros. Among nineteenth-century Americans we have Sarah Jane Woodson (1825–1907), preceptress of English and Latin at Wilberforce University, and one of the first (if not the first) black women on a college faculty; John Wesley Gilbert (c. 1865–1923), who was the first black to attend the American School in Athens; Wiley Lane (1852–1885), who was the first black professor of Greek at Howard University; William Henry Crogman (1841–1931), who taught Greek for forty years at Clark Atlanta University; John Hope (1868–1936), who taught Greek and Latin at Atlanta University and Morehouse College, both of which he later served as president; and Jessie Redmon Fauset (1885–1961), who studied classical languages at Cornell University.¹¹ During the twentieth century, writer Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was inspired to study classics by his high school Latin teacher, Miss Helen Chesnutt, the daughter of writer Charles Chesnutt. The Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen (1903–1946) translated Euripides’s Medea; Robert Hayden (1913–1980) wrote poetry about the Greek hero Perseus, and Rita Dove (1952–) envisioned Demeter and her daughter Persephone in Paris. Toni Morrison (1931–), who minored in classics at Howard University, has infused her novels with classical motifs. The experimental novelist Percival Everett (1956–) employed the myths of Dionysus and Medea to construct plots for two of his books, Frenzy (1997) and For Her Dark Skin (1990). Examples such as these proliferate throughout African American literature.¹²

Outstanding among these cultural figures was William Sanders Scarborough, who was the first professional scholar of African American heritage in the field of classical studies.¹³ For more than three decades he was looked upon as one of the most learned men of his race. This first edition of his autobiography gives us the basis upon which to make a long overdue and well-merited reassessment of his life.

The Man

Scarborough was born with the status of a slave in Macon, Georgia, on February 16, 1852, to Frances Gwynn Scarborough, a woman owned by Colonel William K. DeGraffenreid. For reasons unknown, DeGraffenreid allowed her to marry and live with her husband, Jeremiah, in their own home. As a boy, the precocious Scarborough was encouraged to study—albeit surreptitiously because the education of blacks was illegal and punishable by law in many parts of the South. The young Scarborough said that he daily went out ostensibly to play with my book concealed. In this manner he reported that he continued to evade the law and study.

He was not the only black youngster of his generation hiding his books and gaining his education through stealth. Frederick Douglass was taught to read in secret by his owner’s wife. So too was Susie King Taylor, who was born a slave in 1848 in Savannah, Georgia. She and her brother learned to read and write secretly at the house of her grandmother’s friend, Mrs. Woodhouse. She described this process in her memoir Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902): We went everyday about nine o’clock with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white peoples from seeing them. We went in one at a time, through the gate, into the yard to the kitchen, which was the schoolroom. . . . After school we left the same way we entered, one by one, when we would go to a square about a block from the school and wait for each other.¹⁴

After the Civil War things changed abruptly. The young Scarborough enrolled in the Macon schools, where he excelled. He was no longer a secret scholar. Several years later after studying at Atlanta University, Scarborough earned both his B.A. and M.A. degrees in classics from Oberlin College and began to teach at Wilberforce University soon after. Over the course of the next several years, he rose to national distinction by publishing First Lessons in Greek, a text that according to his obituary in the New York Times made him the first member of his race to prepare a Greek textbook suitable for university use. With this book came fame as he simultaneously demonstrated his own intellectual capacity and that of his entire race. The mindless prejudices of men, who maintained ingrained ideas of negro inferiority, were directly challenged. In particular, John C. Calhoun, who was reported to have said to Samuel E. Sewall and David Lee Child, two Boston attorneys, that if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man, was undone—at least for the moment.¹⁵

During his career Scarborough contributed over twenty scholarly pieces to the official publication of the American Philological Association (APA), Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association (TAPA).¹⁶ These were written summaries of papers he had presented orally at the annual APA meetings where he engaged other scholars. In his era, anyone with an interest in philology, ancient or modern, affiliated with the APA, which was founded in 1869. Later, the modernists founded the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 1883. Scarborough was not the only member of African descent in the APA. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, a number of men of African descent joined the organization. Of these, Scarborough was the first to successfully pursue a lifetime career in the classics, according to the standards recognized today, including affiliation with professional organizations on the national and international levels, attendance and activity at meetings, and an active publication record. Other African American classicists also joined the APA and/or taught courses in the classics at the college and university level during this period.¹⁷

In January 1907 he was among those members of the joint session of the APA and the Archaeological Institute of America who were received by President Theodore Roosevelt in the Blue Room of the White House when the annual meeting was held in Washington, D.C. In 1921, five years before his death at age sixty-nine, he represented the APA as an international delegate to a session of the Classical Association held at Cambridge University.

In addition to philology, Scarborough maintained throughout his life two other especial interests: pedagogy and politics. The three were often combined in his work. He was keenly interested in fostering professional and scholarly progress in languages in general, and in classics in particular. Toward the end of his life he was saddened to observe that now as the controversy grows concerning the classics, [there are] no young colored men of the immediate present who are even meditating on special classical study. It is a great mistake, as the race will find out to leave this field to others with the breadth and culture obtainable in it. This is to say nothing of the opportunity to serve the race especially in the field of African linguistics.

When Scarborough joined the APA in 1882 at the age of thirty, he became the third man of African descent to do so, after Richard T. Greener, who joined in 1875, and Edward Wilmot Blyden, who became a member in 1880.¹⁸ In 1884 he became the first black member of the MLA.¹⁹ In the wider community of scholars, he took his place by joining a number of other learned societies, such as the American Social Science Association, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Negro Academy, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Egyptian Exploration Fund, and the Japan Society. Under Professor Francis Andrew March at Lafayette College, he was part of the unofficial team of readers working on the North American Reading Program (NARP) for the Oxford English Dictionary. He was also on the General Committee of the NAACP in its formative years.

He found time for religious service as well. Following his father’s practice, he was actively involved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1892 he began what turned out to be lifelong service as an editor of the A.M.E. Sunday School Union. He was a delegate in 1901 and in 1921 to the International Ecumenical Methodist Conferences held in London. Classical education was valued by churches of every denomination, and very much by the A.M.E. Church. Generations of students, many of whom became pastors, ministers, reverends, and bishops, were taught by men like Scarborough, and what began as classical and secular learning was transformed on the pulpit into non-secular and evangelical preaching.

His own writings are testimony of the wide range of his intellectual pursuits, for he published essays on topics beyond classical philology concerning the careers of Henry Tanner, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alexander Pushkin, and Goethe.²⁰ Broader themes addressed European travelogues, considered national politics, explained military training at Wilberforce University, critiqued the convict lease system, and explained Creole folktales. These works appeared in both journals and newspapers. From 1888 to 1889, he contributed four pieces to Education, the first on Caesar’s Gallic Wars; the second on the accent and meaning of the Latin word for the wild strawberry tree (arbutus); the third on Vergil’s fourth eclogue; and the fourth on Iphigenia in Euripides, Racine, and Goethe. In addition to essays on classical topics for the schoolroom, he explained and interpreted issues of interest to both African Americans and Americans of European descent in a wide range of publications. These works appeared in numerous journals and newspapers including the Christian Recorder, Christian Register, Journal of Education, American Negro Academy, Southern Workman, Voice of the Negro, Indianapolis Freeman, Frank Leslie’s Weekly, New York Times, A.M.E. Church Review, Forum, Arena, African Times and Orient Review, Current History, The Independent, and several Ohio newspapers. His last published paper was a U.S. Government Document, number 1404, titled Tenancy and Ownership among Negro Farmers in Southampton, Virginia.

For several decades, Scarborough was a leading spokesperson for the African American constituency in the Republican Party in Ohio. His activities brought him in contact with national leaders such as Warren G. Harding, John Sherman, Andrew Carnegie, James G. Blaine, and John F. Slater. Scarborough used these connections to champion the cause of civil rights and liberal arts education for African Americans. From his point of view, true freedom resided not only in equal protection of the law, but also through equal and full access to culture and education.

He openly opposed the narrowness of Booker T. Washington’s mandate for technical training. He felt that Washington served as a much-needed leader, but in the face of Washington’s widespread popularity, Scarborough remained the staunch defender of higher learning for African Americans. He stated in a 1902 essay, The Negro and Higher Learning, that without in the least undervaluing the sphere and influence of industrial training, we may affirm that higher education is, after all, to be the most powerful lever in the Negro’s development and in the ultimate perfection of humanity at large.²¹ Later in a commencement address, The Negro Graduate—His Mission, delivered in 1908 at Atlanta University, Scarborough cautioned the new graduates that the Negro who has . . . advantages of culture must be alert to see that higher aspirations toward learning are not laughed down; scorned, ignored, crushed.²²

Scarborough was always opposed to unilateral programs of industrial education. In fact in 1892 Scarborough was driven from his professorship at Wilberforce University in a political struggle to privilege the utilitarian training over liberal arts. At great financial cost to himself, he found employment at Payne Theological Seminary, where he was supposed to raise his own salary. During this period, he relied on his wife’s income and what he could earn from his writings. In 1897, after a five-year hiatus, he was reappointed to Wilberforce and named vice president. During part of this traumatic exile (1894–1896), W.E.B. DuBois filled Scarborough’s position as professor and department chair of classics. From 1908 to 1920, Scarborough served as president, doing more to make Wilberforce nationally and internationally known than any other person save Bishop Daniel Payne, the school’s founder.²³ Suffice it to say Scarborough’s experience as a college president was taxing. Nevertheless, he accepted the challenge and did his duty.

In 1886 Scarborough expressed his concerns about the negative effect that the elective system was having on college studies in an article, The New College Fetich, which appeared in the A.M.E. Church Review.²⁴ This was his subtle answer to Charles Francis Adams’s controversial lecture, The College Fetich, delivered to the members of the Harvard University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in June 1883. In this presentation, Adams contradicted two generations of the Adams family and denounced the classical curriculum. Using his own career as evidence, he declared its product superficial learning. And although he did not object to a college Latin requirement, he felt that the study of ancient Greek was a positive educational wrong. Furthermore, he concluded that in a utilitarian and scientific age, the living will not forever be sacrificed to the dead.²⁵ Scarborough, whose scholarly attainments were mainly in ancient Greek, the bane of Adams’s college days, was not reactionary. However, in that 1886 essay Scarborough predicted that the romance languages would become part of college admission standards.²⁶ Nevertheless, he was concerned that the elective system in general would destroy genuine scholarship and prevent students of all colors from gaining a wide command of culture.

In an article published in Forum in 1898, shortly after his return to Wilberforce, he assumed the rhetorical posture of an anonymous, adversarial interlocutor, and in regard to higher education for African Americans asked: Why waste higher education thus? Why not give the Negro industrial training exclusively? Why not give him a pick instead of Greek and Latin? To which he responded that higher education is not wasted on the race no matter what facts are found as to his condition . . . it is no more wasted on the race than it would be on white boys and girls, some of whom . . . follow pursuits more or less menial in character . . . it is not wasted because . . . there is hope of a future for other boys and girls—a future with better conditions.²⁷

In 1903, for an essay published by the American Negro Academy, he wrote that industrial training is needed, too, to teach how to earn a living, but . . . something else—the higher education—must be counted upon to teach [pupils] how to live better lives, how to get the most and the best out of life.²⁸ W.E.B. DuBois would later gain an international audience for voicing a program using similar ideas. But on this particular topic Scarborough had anticipated many of the ideas now associated with DuBois. One thinks immediately, for example, of Scarborough when reading this statement published by DuBois in 1918: Anyone who suggests by sneering at books and ‘literary courses’ that the great heritage of human thought ought to be displaced simply for the reason of teaching the technique of modern industry is pitifully wrong and, if the comparison must be made, more wrong than the man who would sacrifice modern technique to the heritage of ancient thought.²⁹

Mode and Method

While reading Scarborough’s narrative, the reader must heed C. S. Lewis’s warning to avoid chronological snobbery, which is the feeling that one’s own era is the best and brightest. For it will seem to some readers that Scarborough got it all wrong, that he wasted his vital years in attainments of no consequence such as the study of the dead languages, and conclude quite illogically that because he is not now recognized among the brand names of a few figures that we regularly venerate today, he was a failure. Detractors will revile him as Uncle Tom Scarborough, a second-rate talent whose career was based on ideas that were naively moralistic and unoriginal. With a frown others will see him as a pathetic dupe of the Republican Party and offer up Warren G. Harding, whom Scarborough counted as a friend, as proof. These conclusions spring from a shallow perception and low motives including selfishness. The small-minded reader is unhappy when Scarborough doesn’t behave and things do not occur the way the reader thinks that they should. But let these criticisms come forth. The condition of the forgotten or the disenfranchised cannot be altered without opening it up to public analysis.

Let it also be said that Scarborough is no literary master, but he is a competent narrator and far and away the best witness to his own life. An autobiography by definition is an account of a life told by the one who lived it. Unlike heterobiography, a life story given by another person, the author of an autobiography cannot describe his last moments on earth or learn posterity’s verdict. Here in this edition definitive elements of autobiography and heterobiography are combined. In twenty-eight chapters, Scarborough brings the reader from his childhood in Georgia to his retirement in Ohio. The final chapter is a portrait of his decline and death written by his wife. I, as editor, have corrected the textual infelicities in the narrative and supplemented Scarborough’s words with numerous explanatory notes and documentary evidence.

The first three chapters describe Scarborough’s life during slavery and are, in effect, a slave narrative. Taken as a whole, however, his cradle-to-grave account offers valuable new evidence concerning the theory and practice of black autobiographical writing. His experience also reveals the critical role that the A.M.E. Church has played in stimulating and sustaining the intellect of its members—the key to mental health—amid intra-denominational cohesion and conflict.

Scarborough’s account is especially valuable to historians of this period. He was, like a veritable Forrest Gump, an eyewitness to many events. He saw Jefferson Davis led away as a prisoner of war. He heard Richard Wright call out, Tell them we are rising! He sat at the table with John Sherman at the first Lincoln Day Banquet held in Ohio. He saw Frederick Douglass cut a pigeon wing at Cedar Hall shortly before Douglass died, and he attended the funeral of Booker T. Washington. Scarborough had no script to follow in describing his unorthodox life, and in the public presentation of himself he was compelled to find his own design. At times his testimony seems to get bogged down in myriad names and dates, which are presented in a relentless chronological sequence. But as the reader becomes aware of Scarborough’s need to authenticate himself in the world, this mass of details is realized as Scarborough’s own proof that he actually did what he said he did.

His autobiographical record is in fact a priceless repository for us. It stands as a primary source to a key period in American history. Because it is a black perspective and because it is an account that was not previously available to scholars and the reading public, it assumes even more importance. Furthermore, without this detailed record, his path-breaking career would have been utterly lost to history. He lived in a time of great racial divide, and many of the white people with whom he interacted, however cordial they might have been to him in person, did not mention him in their own writings. He was visibly invisible.

His fellow classicists, for example, did not mention him in their published writings. But like a proverbial raisin in milk, he could not have been missed in meetings that usually had fewer than fifty attendees. Scarborough, for his part, mentioned by name the classicists he admired and those who treated him respectfully. He often quoted from their letters to him. On the other hand, he left out the names of those who were snide or abusive to him. One wonders if he knew of—and surely he did—the older generation of classicists who had supported the African American struggle to gain freedom and civil rights. This group of abolitionists and neo-abolitionists includes men such as Charles Beck (1798–1866), professor of Latin at Harvard University, who assisted travelers on the Underground Railroad; Andrew Sledd (1870–1939), professor of Latin at Emory, whose article against lynching published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1902 cost him his job; Alpheus Crosby (1810–1874), professor of Greek at Dartmouth, who edited a series of textbooks for freedmen; and Charles Dexter Cleveland (1802–1874), who as a youth joined with his fellow classmate at Dartmouth College, Salmon P. Chase, to give anti-slavery lectures in 1844 and 1845.³⁰

To the reader’s irritation, Scarborough is never as candid as the reader would like. But scandal, tale telling, and backstage drama did not interest him. He selected his words with care, and he always came down on the side of caution. His immediate audience was a heterogeneous group of friends, foes, and former students, black and white, in the United States and abroad, and from all walks of life. He wrote his narrative in the last four years of his life, a time when he was overextended in the service of Wilberforce University. For twelve arduous years, Scarborough put away his scholarly work. This period was followed by two lonely years in Washington, D. C., without his wife while working for the Harding administration. By the early 1920s, Scarborough was fully retired and living quietly with his wife in Wilberforce, but without the financial support and vocational prestige of a Carnegie teacher’s pension. The couple had undoubtedly seen it all. Together they had given almost ninety years of unbroken service to the Wilberforce community and to the world at large.

The tone of his words is consistently one of uplift and optimism, which is a quality found in many other African American writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Frances E. W. Harper and William H. Crogman to William Pickens.³¹ He was never less than dignified, and he falls silent in portions of his narrative when the reader expects a litany of complaint, self-pity, or rage. Instead, he maintains a forward gaze, thereby encouraging the reader to look to the future and to rejoice in new patterns of progress and achievement. He led by example and repeatedly shows his reading audience how he turned pain into artful action, anger into spiritual enlightenment, and frustration into faithful commitment to God, the all-provident.

This is the foundation of Scarborough’s will to act despite daunting or impossible tasks. In the classical sense, such courage marks him a hero, for it is the essence of heroism to take up a quest against all odds with little more than life and limb, and through a transcendent act reach a higher standard of achievement. It is in that moment, according to the classical paradigm, when frail mortals attempt to do something great, that they rival the immortals. But the hero’s success does not ensure lasting acclaim. Instead, he may find that he is misunderstood, reviled, and even ostracized. This dialectic was also a part of Scarborough’s experience.

It is no surprise that his prose is—as Cornel West has noted—touched with Victorian conceit.³² A proper gentleman of natural reserve, he could wax sentimental and was capable of manly weeping, as was evidenced during a reception held at his home for a group of shell-shocked African American World War I veterans. Photographs from every period of his life present him as the portrait of propriety. He always appears in a finely tailored suit, white shirt, and tie. Precise and patrician in deportment, he was also handsome, vital, and charismatic, conveying a contradictory image. This restraint was similarly expressed in his conservative, personal life. In his own words he never danced, and he kept his wineglass turned down at dinner parties. He amused himself with checkers and croquet, and refreshed himself with music. And yet underneath the polished demeanor of this Victorian man of letters was the soul of a revolutionary and the spirit of a subversive whose words and deeds were quietly breaking down conventions of prejudice. The era required such constraint and camouflage. He intentionally concealed much of his private life and his private thoughts out of a sense of propriety and in self-defense. From an early age Scarborough realized the eyes of the world were upon him. In his youth he was a model student, and in his maturity he was a race exemplar. As one of the earliest advocates for African American academic endeavor, he became an intellectual icon for a people who were continually accused of not having an intellectual tradition.

Not only was his life regarded as exemplary, so too was his home. The Scarboroughs called their house in Wilberforce Tretton Place, derived from Tretton Park, the setting in Anthony Trollope’s novel Mr. Scarborough’s Family (1883). This witty, literary allusion reiterated the bookish Scarboroughs’ reverence for literature and their sense of humor. They lovingly engraved the name on their personal stationery, and the house was a pleasant setting over the years for many gatherings of students, friends, and family.

In 1900 Tretton Place acquired celebrity when a photograph of it titled Professor Scarborough’s Home was showcased as one of six Negro Homes at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.³³ Subsequently, Tretton Place became the residence of Wilberforce’s next several presidents. In 1973 the house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior. On April 3, 1974, Mrs. Scarborough’s birthday, the house, which was then occupied by Lionel H. Newsom, president of Central State University,³⁴ was destroyed by a tornado.³⁵ Today the site of Tretton Place lies underneath a parking lot for students at Central State University.

Interracial Marriage

Other aspects of Scarborough’s personal world were no less extraordinary. He embraced Gandhi’s admonishment to be the change you wish to see in the world. In his autobiography he reveals little about his wife, who was a white divorcée. The two met in Macon in the mid-1870s when he was on the faculty of Lewis High School and she was Sarah Cordelia Bierce, the school’s principal. Born in Danby, New York, on April 3, 1851, to Phoebe Cordelia Bierce (1820–1896) and George Washington Bierce (1819–1907), she arrived in Macon with the American Missionary Association (AMA) after completing the classical course at the famed Oswego Institute in upstate New York in 1875. This was a new start in life for her. In 1865, when she was only fourteen years of age, Sarah married Solomon Roper Grant (1843–1923). Their marriage quickly dissolved. Grant did not support her, and she said that her very life was threatened. In 1870 her parents persuaded her to separate. One of their sons, Harry Irwin Grant, died at the age of eight months and eight days in Minnesota, and the other, Francis Granger Grant (1866–1910), was left in the care of her parents. Much can be surmised here, because neither Scarborough’s nor his wife’s papers reveal details about his wife’s first marriage.

In 1876, after arsonists destroyed Lewis High School, the two colleagues separated in order to find work.³⁶ For a short period Scarborough taught in South Carolina and then returned to higher education at Oberlin College. It is not clear what Sarah Bierce did, but there is some suggestion that she suffered a nervous breakdown. Perhaps something more than fate