Enslavement, Resistance, Freedom

Jump down to section: Pre-Civil War Era Abolitionism; Oratory            Opposing Calhoun's Denial of Black Intelligence

(Search C-RM and C-RVP or by Grades to locate classroom ready materials, such as Grades9-12)

Topics: Phillis Wheatley's work; Caribbean Latinists

Phillis Wheatley classroom presentation slides covering classical influences in her life and poetry, as well as slides on the oratorical style of Frederick Douglass. They mention many of the subsequent authors in this list and provide a good introductory overview. The slides were created for the Race, Ethnicity and Identity in the Greco-Roman World course by Dr. Hannah Culik-Baird of University of California, Los Angeles and are included here with her permission.  C-RM Grades13-16

Carretta, V. (ed.) 2001. Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings. Penguin Books, New York. This expansive book also has an appendix with some works of Jupiter Hammon and Francis Williams. Check your institutional library for free access.

John C. Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts, 2008, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville. Cairns Collection of American Women Writers  'In this volume, John C. Shields demonstrates that much of the negative response to Phillis Wheatley's writings has been based on false assumptions and myths about her and her work. Much of this criticism began more than a century ago and has been passed on without dissent by generations of readers. Here, Shields sets a course for Wheatley scholars that will redefine the direction of future writing about her. Shields provides new readings for a great many of her poems. He shows that Wheatley's writing was deeply imbedded in several literary traditions, demonstrating that her work is the result of an African inheritance, a complex relationship with a Congregationalist religious heritage, and an intense involvement with classical literature. Read closely, Wheatley's works show she deserves credit for creating a liberationist aesthetic - the full implications of which are still to be worked out.' -- publisher

The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America by June Jordan, 2002. Phillis Wheatley Peters (c.1753 - December 5, 1784) Her status as the first African American poet is a "difficult miracle." ”It was not natural. And she was the first: Phillis Miracle: Phillis Miracle Wheatley: the first Black human being to be published in America. She was the second female to be published in America…..”   C-RM Grades13-16

Gates, H.L., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. 2003, New York. (Available online through UCLA’s YRL and/or your college library sign in.) In The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores the pivotal roles that Wheatley and Jefferson played in shaping the black literary tradition. Writing with all the lyricism and critical skill that place him at the forefront of American letters, Gates brings to life the characters, debates, and controversy that surrounded Wheatley in her day and ours. (129 pages)

Greenwood, E. (2011) ‘The Politics of Classicism in the Poetry of Phyllis Wheatley’, in Alston, R., Hall, E. & McConnell, J (eds.) Chapter 6 in Ancient Slavery and Abolition, from Hobbes to Hollywood (Oxford): p.153-80. Click to see institutional access page. Greenwood ( p.165) writes, "Wheatley was denied the right to signify the Classics. The critical consensus [was] that her classical allusions were secondary allusions,... You know that you have been well and truly marginalized when even your neoclassicism is held to be derivative!"

Oxford University Press offers this centralized information for Phillis Wheatley, born in Gambia ca. 1753. This collected list of relevant works on Wheatley are mostly library access. https://academic.oup.com/oxford-scholarship-online/search-results?page=1&q=Phillis%20Wheatley&fl_SiteID=6556&SearchSourceType=1&allJournals=1

Waldstreicher, D. 2017. “Ancients, Moderns, and Africans: Phillis Wheatley and the Politics of Empire and Slavery in the American Revolution,” in Journal of the Early Republic 37: p.701–33. Project MUSE access, https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2017.0068. 'Phillis Wheatley exacerbated and made manifest the double meaning, and risks, of the classical and republican revival in the context of slavery. She did this, in part, by re-creating herself through the Greek and Roman classics—as a neoclassical poet—and by making the relationship of the patriots’ dilemma to the ancient and modern politics of slavery a key theme of her very public project. Wheatley’s own realization that she could address her African and enslaved experience as well as her captors’ prejudices and practices through an engagement with the Mediterranean heritage—a heritage seen by her captors as at once distant (ancient) and universal—was pivotal. Her profundity and political effectiveness derived not just from her classicism but from its studied inflection of her Africanism—and her womanhood. Ultimately Wheatley followed through on an increasingly complex set of analogies regarding time, space, empires, barbarisms, and liberties that proved useful in confronting the American Revolution as well as slavery' -- publisher

Waldstreicher, D, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journey through American Slavery and Independence. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2023. A new interpretation of the significance of Wheatley's poetry. "Yet, as the historian David Waldstreicher shows in “The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley,” his thoroughly researched, beautifully rendered and cogently argued biography, Wheatley is brilliant not merely because she survived and composed some of the most important works of trans-Atlantic literature. Rather, Waldstreicher insists, Wheatley was a supremely gifted neoclassical practitioner of language, an “organic intellectual of the enslaved.”- The New York Times review 2023. Kindle and audiobook also available

John Levi Barnard, Empire of Ruin, Black Classicism and the American Imperial Culture, 2017. Read Ch.1 ‘Phillis Wheatley and the Affairs of State’ To check for your institutional library’s access, click here.  Barnard 'argues that classicism functions as a "language of power" and is itself central to the cultural hegemony that underlies and authorizes the regime of oppression and enslavement.' and 'radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin." '- Oxford University Press.  Specific chapters on Phillis Wheatley and Charles Chesnutt.

Walking Tours: The City of Boston, MA offers information on historical trails in the city:  In a blog from Boston Public Library your students can learn about less well-known but still relevant are the statues that decorate the Commonwealth Avenue Mall. Between the Public Garden and the Fens, there are memorials at each intersection. Don't miss the Boston Women's Memorial, which is dedicated to Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone, and Phillis Wheatley. The Boston Women's Heritage Trail also designed a Ladies Walk to go with the memorial. There are neighborhood-based self-guided and student-designed tours. The National Parks Service offers a Black Heritage Trail. 

Walters, T,  African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison, Palgrave, New York, 2007. This is a groundbreaking study exploring the significant relationship between western classical mythology and African American women's literature. A comparative analysis of classical revisions by …Phillis Wheatley and Pauline Hopkins and twentieth century writers Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove reveals that Black women writers revise specific classical myths for artistic and political agency. …The women also use myth as a liberating space where they can 'speak the unspeakable' and empower their subjects as well as themselves. – Palgrave Macmillan

Note: This book with additional notes on contents is listed on our page The Last Century in relation to other Black women writers discussed there: Hopkins, Ray,  Brooks, and Dove. Here is access to a published review by Jennifer C. Rossi.  Readable via "borrow for ---" tab on Internet Archive; you choose the length of time for access.

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharpe (2016); A Goodreads review states “In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.”

Francis Williams of Jamaica: “Francis Williams: An Eighteenth-Century Tertium Quid,” Ronnick, Michele Valerie, Negro History Bulletin, vol. 61, no. 2, 1998, pp. 19–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24767367. Williams (1690-1702? to 1770) was born into a free family of Black landowners, educated in England and possibly first African American graduate of Cambridge. He was a pioneer for black education. Francis wrote poetry in English and Latin, becoming one of Jamaica's earliest and most successful poets, and was called the ‘Horace of Jamaica.’ This cited article contains a Latin poem by Williams that survives. NCLG offers a copy for classroom use:  article and poem C-RM  Grades9-16

Latin Poetry in the Caribbean:  Dr. John Gilmore of University of Warwick speaks on extant early Latin poetry in Jamaica / Barbados in a Khameleon Classics podcast. He talks about the “surprising part that Latin poetry had to play in the colonial Caribbean, where black Africans had been enslaved since the 16th century. By the early 18th century, Latin and classical poetry were being used by inhabitants of the Caribbean to express feelings both in support of and against slavery, with black and white poets drawing on a long tradition in which composing Latin poetry was considered a mark of so-called 'cultured' accomplishment. The resulting works created a landscape of impassioned and conflicting discourses around slavery, laying the groundwork for the conversations on abolition that would emerge in the late 18th and 19th centuries.” Transcript of podcast   C-RM Grades13-16

New York town researches a past of enslavement by the founding Huguenot families in New Paltz. Slavery's hidden history in the mid-Hudson Valley coming to light.  A Poughkeepsie Journal article describes the town’s early 17th century history and how SUNY students’ work for recognition of a past of enslavement by Huguenots whose denomination’s founding leaders abhorred enslavement.

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Topics: The early abolitionist movement; The voice of free African Americans; Frederick Douglass, Spartacus and Orator, The Columbian Orator, William Henry Johnson, and others

Suggestion: For researching the involvement of African Americans, look for their bios under the Inductees tab of the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum, located in Peterboro, NY.  Website Grades9-16

To underscore the extent of enslavement in the United States in 1860, just prior to the Civil War, please take a look at this census of the population, state by state. This information is a good way to gauge the depth of despair that was prevalent and the resulting abolitionists' fervor to resist that enslavement at any cost.  C-RM  Grades9-16

Margaret Malamud, African Americans And The Classics: Antiquity, Abolition And Activism, I. B. Tauris, London 2016. Malamud presents a good summary of time periods, movements, and major figures useful to start one’s research and teaching in this area and the book is well-designed for classroom use.  Malamud takes a long historical view of the ways that knowledge of Latin and Greek and those ancient civilizations and cultures was used by African Americans as a tool for resistance, as they worked for political rights, equality, and access to educational opportunities usually withheld from Black slaves, former slaves, and free Blacks. 

    To learn more about abolitionists, we suggest focusing on the Introduction overview and Chapter 2 Figuring the Resistance (see link below).  It covers Liberty or Death, Origin Narratives, Weapon of Oratory, Greek Revolution, Punica fides? and An African Spartacus, touching on hypocrisies of American Independence, political and social slavery, Margaret Garner, Frederick Douglass and ties to Caesar, Cicero and Carthage.

   NCLG offers Quotes and Reflections: Study Guides 1-5 with reflection questions for students to answer on each quoted selection. Direct links to all 5 discussion guides are listed at the top of each NCLG Study Guide: Introduction      Fighting for Classics      Refiguring Classical Resistance     Ancient and Modern Slavery     Constructing History / Afterword    Study guides are C-RM Grades13-16

  Frederick Douglass:

Meer, S. 2009. “Douglass as Orator and Editor,” in M.S. Lee (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass. Cambridge University Press: p.46–59. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521889230.004 - seek viewing access through your institutional library. 'Douglass’ rhetorical ability was exceptional even in an age when politics, churches, revivals, and the great reform movements of the 1840s (not the least of which was the antislavery campaign) produced charismatic speakers. All over New England and far into the West, town lyceums held winter lecture courses, and by the 1840s the lyceum circuit drew huge audiences and provided a lucrative living for professional lecturers. Douglass distinguished himself first in the pulpit, then as a promoter of abolition, temperance, and women’s rights. He became a lyceum star with speeches on topics like “Self- Made Men,” “Santo Domingo,” and “Our Composite Nationality”; and he gave the first scholarly commencement address by an African American, presenting “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” at Western Reserve College in Ohio in 1854. In this, and in speeches on the denial of literacy to slaves, Douglass not only challenged the racial assumptions of his contemporaries, but, in James Perrin Warren’s words, cleared “a cultural space in which [African Americans could] speak and write.” - Cambridge Core review

Frederick Douglass’ autobiography: Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave.  The influence of reading and practicing the speeches and rhetorical lessons and advice in The Columbian Orator (incl. Socrates, Philo, Paullus, Cicero, Cato, Cassius et al).  The entire Preface of the published Narrative, added by abolitionist Wm. Lloyd Garrison, contains pages extolling the high intellectual virtues and character of Douglass in contrast to the horrific conditions of his enslavement and overwhelming prejudice. Text online HERE by Project Gutenberg.  Image: https://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.25385/?sp=3.   Also, a digital text is HERE from UNC Chapel Hill on their 'Documenting the American South.' C-RM  Grades9-16

Tangential materials on Douglass: PBS The American Experience has numerous video clips from the PBS archives: “Frederick Douglass and Abolitionist Movements”  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/abolitionists/ Frederick Douglass’ autobiography: Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave: https://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.25385/?sp=3  Included references to his absorption of rhetoric from The Columbia Orator with “translated” speeches from history. Two speeches of Frederick Douglass; “A lecture on John Brown” and What if we could sit, hearing his speech? See “Lessons of the Hour” on the so-called  “Race Problem” 1895, Library of Congress with images.  Videos: C-RVP  Grades9-16

Celebrating February 14: Frederick Douglass’ Birthday resources: Although Douglass’ actual birthdate is unknown, he later chose February 14  as the day to celebrate his birth, recalling that his mother called him her “Little Valentine.” The above link has teaching materials related to this African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman (c. February 14, 1817 - February 20, 1895). Offered are: My Bondage and My Freedom (2nd autobiographical work of Douglass), Douglass’ 1852 Rochester Speech on hypocrisy of slavery in America, In Memory of Abraham Lincoln speech at the Emancipation Memorial opening, and Douglass, a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The Florida Center for Instructional Technology (FCIT), located at the University of South Florida, has free resource websites averaging over two million hits per school day from nearly 200 countries and territories. These sites are specifically designed to support K-12 curriculum with age-appropriate content. C-RM  GradesK-12   (appropriate age range depends on resource)

Learning the valuable skill of persuasive oratory: The Columbian Orator, Caleb Bingham, 1797, Manning and Loring, Boston. Digital text from University of Michigan:  https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=evans;idno=N24063.0001.001. Over 200,000 copies were sold by 1832 and it went on for other printings! The American Preceptor, his earlier volume also contained speeches on evils of enslavement. Columbian Orator contained many oratorical pieces, including classical speeches: Socrates' defense, General Paullus Aemilius, (part of ) Cicero's Catalinarian, Cato's speech after the Catalinarian orations, C. Cassius after the Ides of March, Galgacus, opponent of Agricola at Mons Graupius.

Morse, H, “Beyond Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic: Black Elocutionary Education in Post-Emancipation America,” in the American Journal of Philology 143.2: 279–304, 2022..  On Barnard College Classics resource site page, an editor contributed this review: "Tracing the educational programs started and led by Black classicists in the south of the 19th century –among them William Sander Scarborough, Anna Julia Cooper, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Church Terrell– Morse’s piece unpacks the development of rhetoric as a toolkit for engagement in democracy and citizenship in post-Jim Crow, pre-Civil Rights Movement America. Cataloging the various textbooks written for this method of elocution and their pedagogical entanglements. The article’s focus on sonic pedagogies and their relevance to an altered “soundscape” of  American classicism is particularly engaging and invests in a way of thinking about the resonances of educational patterns over time, regional, and racial contexts. Morse is sure to expose readers with this to an archive of Black educators, their methods, and the import of their teaching for the development of a student body which, though excluded from equal participation, was oriented towards civic engagement." (AR, 2022)

John Brown, by W.E.B. Du Bois, G.W.Jacobs, 1909. This is a “biography of abolitionist John Brown is a literary and historical classic. With a rare combination of scholarship and passion, Du Bois defends Brown against all detractors who saw him as a fanatic, fiend, or traitor. Brown emerges as a rich personality, fully understandable as an unusual leader with a deeply religious outlook and a devotion to the cause of freedom for the slave. This new edition is enriched with an introduction by John David Smith and with supporting documents relating to Du Bois's correspondence with his publisher.“- Libri GmbH (406 pages)  For access options see NCLG resource page.

William Henry Johnson; Important in the Underground Railroad movement, Johnson wrote his Autobiography which can be found in the Albany (NY) Public Library, and the New York State Library Archive. Internet Archive has digitized his autobiography including his correspondences, and it is viewable from University of California and other libraries. I found the Internet Archive site’s own copy easier to read - view HERE. Johnson was born in Alexandria, VA to a free Black family in 1833 and died in 1918. He left home and traveled to Philadelphia, learned a trade, then moved to Albany where he supported the Underground Railroad and assisted abolitionist Stephen Myers. He returned to support fugitives in Philadelphia until dangerous conditions made a return to Albany necessary. Johnson’s formal education is unknown but he early belonged to a literary society to practice writing and oratory and soon became a popular public speaker, author of countless news articles and pamphlets and crafted several important changes to state legislation. He also studied law and medicine, where he likely needed a solid knowledge of Latin. He held offices within the New York State Republican Conventions, was the first Black man elected to the NY State Republican Committee and attended several National Republican Conventions (Fremont (Lincoln),Garfield, Harrison, Grant, McKinley). He was the first Black elected ‘Janitor of the State Senate’ and of the ‘High Court of Impeachment’ (with Sargeant at Arms of Senate and Court of Appeals). He was also held highest Masonic rank and worked to dissolve the Color Line among Masons. He achieved most all of the repeals of racial discrimination in major NY laws, such as repeals of property ownership as a requisite for voting, restrictions on Black military service, unfair segregation and quality of education, and unfair fraud against Blacks by the insurance industry. He chaired the NYS Equal Rights Committee (1866-1873). He published his own papers, wrote articles for many Black newspapers, including Douglass’ The North Star. He knew Frederick Douglass, John Brown, W.S. Scarborough, William Highland Garnet, William Myers, Octavius Catto, and other anti-slavery spokespeople.

Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford: Ancient Rhetoric, Abolition, and Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford’s The Tragedy (1897) Dr. Kelly Dugan writes on Rev. Stanford’s use of the tools of ancient rhetoric in his work, The Tragedy, to look over the long view of history to argue for the sanctity of Black life, in an era of lynching and Jim Crow. He lived February 21, 1858  to  May 20, 1909.

Myrtilla Miner: Miner was a White woman born in Brookfield, New York, on March 4, 1815. She was a leader in teacher training for free African American women, as she viewed knowledge and education as essential to the abolition of  slavery.  After various teaching positions, she taught in Mississippi, where she saw the  horrific conditions there and realized the importance of African American education to the abolition of slavery. She was forbidden to teach Black students, she moved to New York and then Washington DC. Frederick Douglas thought her plans for a school to be very dangerous  for her personally.  In 1851 in Washington, D.C., Myrtilla Miner founded the School for Colored Girls. Later it was renamed Miner Normal School (in 1929 Miner Teaching College and in 1955 D.C. Teachers College). Its main building, constructed in 1913 with Congressional approval, still stands on the campus of Howard University.  It would be an adjunct to today’s Black educational institutions in DC, such as University of the District of Columbia, Howard University. It has been training Black female teachers since its inception! Until desegregation in the 1950s, it supplied almost all the teachers for the Black public schools in DC and its teachers were in high demand across the Southern States. Please see sources: https://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/386  and https://www.nps.gov/places/miner-normal-school.htm and https://www.nationalabolitionhalloffameandmu(seum.org/myrtilla-miner.html

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Topics: Proving African American intellectual equality - examples; Roots and effects of White supremacy 

The challenge of John C. Calhoun: In 1833 or 1834, American pro-slavery thinkers were very much on the defensive. It was then that  the Senator for South Carolina, John C. Calhoun, notoriously declared at a Washington dinner party that only when he could ‘find a[n African American] who knew the Greek syntax’ could he be brought to ‘believe that the [African American] was a human being and should be treated as a man.’ Meeting this challenge and proving African American intellectual equality, here are but a few examples:

Dr. John Stewart Rock made famous these phrases: “Black is beautiful,” and (1858) “I will sink or swim with my race” (Born October 13, 1825 in Salem, NJ  – Died December 3, 1866, Boston, MA) Schoolteacher, dentist, physician, lawyer, graduate of the American Medical College in Philadelphia, member of the Massachusetts bar, proficient in Greek and Latin, Dr. John S. Rock was unequivocally one of the most distinguished African American leaders to emerge in the United States during the antebellum era. Details: A free African American, he attended public schools and then became a teacher while studying medicine. Denied admission to medical school, he studied dentistry and opened a practice. He did gain admission to American Medical School and graduated in 2 years. He moved to Boston and also served fugitive slaves for free. His education made him a gifted orator for abolition, voting rights and the new Republican Party. **(see below) When his health failed, he studied law and was one of the first African Americans admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1861. After the 13th Amendment passed in 1865, he was immediately  invited to the US Supreme Court, but his tuberculosis forced him to refuse to serve.  ** On March 5, 1858, Dr. Rock delivered a speech at Boston’s Faneuil Hall as part of the annual Crispus Attucks Day observance (first man killed at Boston Massacre, African-Indigenous ancestry) organized by Boston’s black abolitionists in response to the Dred Scott decision. Rock shared the platform with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker. Three years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Dr. Rock correctly predicted that African Americans were destined to play an important role in the impending military conflict over slavery. His speech appears in full HERE. Source: Library of Congress

Alexander Crummell (March 3,1819 - September 10, 1898) and https://www.classicsandclass.info/product/96/  An Episcopalian priest, civil rights campaigner, intellectual and early pan-Africanist.  He defied American pro-slavery politicians' statements (like John C. Calhoun) to become an expert in ancient Greek. Child of a free woman and freedman in New York, he overheard a discussion between two lawyers about the remark of Calhoun.  Alexander Crummell later said that it was this insult which motivated him to head for Cambridge University in England, where he indeed learned Greek as part of his studies in theology at Queens’ College (1851–3). His university education was financed by abolitionist campaigners. To counter the strong influence of people promoting only industrial education for African Americans after the Civil War, he finally spearheaded the formation of the ANA in 1897, a scholarly association to recognize and support Black scholarship of all kinds. Most of its members supported a classical, liberal arts education. He ridiculed and criticized those who attitudes limited the academic advancement and potential of African Americans, keeping them in a pseudo slavery of manual labor and exploitation. More on Crummell is elsewhere in this resource.

William Sanders Scarborough (February 16, 1852 - September 9, 1926) A stunning counter example to the Calhoun mindset is William Sanders Scarborough. Henry Louis Gates (in his foreword to Ronnick’s edition of Scarborough’s autobiography) called him “the scholar’s scholar.” He rose from nothing to earn three degrees, publish a Greek textbook, become the first Black MLA member, third APA member, a university president, a leader in world ecumenical conferences on freedom and equity, as well as a resource and advocate called upon by two presidents, vice presidents, and two Ohio governors! 

     Scarborough himself remarks on this prejudicial 'Calhoun mindset' on p.7, 44, 120-121, 321 of his autobiography, Autobiography of Williams Sanders Scarborough, W.S. Scarborough: Ronnick, Ed., 2005. Ronnick's edition is a academically thorough yet quite readable resource for students and teachers alike. Recommended for all classics students!  William Sanders Scarborough's Wiki page has numerous useful links.

    Emily Greenwood offers very insightful remarks about the importance of the publishing of the contents of his Autobiography and Collected Works by Michele Valerie Ronnick (2006) in her review of five authors in Re-rooting the classical tradition: New directions in black classicism. She feels that his life tells a story placing a countercultural icon into the debate about the role of the Classics in African American intellectual life, about the kind of African American who was capable of challenging Calhoun's challenge. "There is a temptation to elevate Scarborough to the status of a man whose genius triumphed over adversity and injustice. The autobiography tells a more complicated story in which Scarborough’s very considerable achievements as a scholar were won in spite of continuous setbacks." And his vision was one of pure classicism, not black or white. (Her review of the Autobiography is fourth in the article which is posted on Oxford Academic; 2009, from Classical Receptions Journal).

Ebenezer D. Bassett; first  Black student at Connecticut Normal School, Principal of ICY the first African American college, and first African American foreign diplomat. “Ebenezer D. Bassett was born in Connecticut on October 16, 1833. A rarity during the mid-1800s, Bassett attended college, becoming the first black student to integrate the Connecticut Normal School in 1853.  He then taught in New Haven, befriending the legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass.  Later, he became the principal of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Institute for Colored Youth (ICY)… Bassett was appointed U.S. Minister Resident to Haiti in 1869, making him the first African American diplomat. …President Ulysses S. Grant made him one of the highest ranking black members of the United States government…. Returning to become …Consul General for Haiti in New York City, New York. For eight years, this educator, abolitionist, and black rights activist oversaw bilateral relations through bloody civil warfare and coups d’état on the island of Hispaniola.  Bassett served with distinction, courage, and integrity in one of the most crucial, but difficult postings of his time.” -BlackPast.org

W.E.B. Du Bois (February 23, 1868 - August 27, 1963). Du Bois was a Black American (late in life also a citizen of Ghana) born of free African American parents in Massachusetts and raised by his mother. He rose to become a scholar, sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist who was promoting full academic education for African American students. He received a BA from Fisk and Harvard, and then an MA and Ph.D from Harvard, plus continuing in graduate studies in Berlin. He taught classical and modern languages at Wilberforce University in Ohio while completing his Harvard degree work. He went on to research at University of Pennsylvania before he began teaching at The Atlanta University.  Please consult our webpage Racial Uplift for many more references to his writings relating to classical education.

Roots and Effects of White Supremacy: 

Kelly Miller, The Primary Needs of the Negro Race; An Address (1899) covers Aryan efforts to project inferiority on non-white cultures and the longterm effects of that. Library of Congress12003483. Kelly Miller (Juky 18,1863 - December 29, 1939) was an American mathematician, sociologist, essayist, newspaper columnist, author, and an important figure in the intellectual life of Black America for close to half a century, in universities and beyond. He was known among colleagues as "the Bard of the Potomac." See more on his strong, early Classics connections at Fairfield Institute, Howard, and Johns Hopkins in our NCLG Black South Carolinians booklet by Michele Valerie Ronnick, listed along with other entries for him on our Racial Uplift page.

E.A. Hairston writes on the face of White supremacy: The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West, UT Press, Knoxville, 2013. Access preview link here. A reading of the Introduction (24 pages) will offer students an excellent overview of the views and goals of Hairston’s scholarship. Chapters cover in depth Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Using primary and secondary sources, Hairston works to reclaim the classical themes and concepts of virtue, pietas, courage, self-knowledge, reasoning, mores, justice, etc., so deeply embedded in ancient literature and philosophy that became central to the personal lives and works of these people as they faced the dehumanizing side of white supremacy, imperialism and capitalism - also rooted in antiquity. (p.14-63 Phillis Wheatley and The Goliath of Gath, p. 65-120 Frederick Douglass,  p. 121-158 Anna Julia Cooper, p. 159-74 Du Bois, On the Wings of Atalanta. (Buy book, PDF, Google Play, MUSE, or borrow from libraries.) Further reference to Hairston's work on this page of our resources.

Margaret Malamud, African Americans And The Classics: Antiquity, Abolition And Activism, I. B. Tauris, London 2016. Malamud presents a good summary of time periods, movements, strategies, and major figures. This book is a very useful place to start one’s teaching and learning in this area. The book is well-designed for classroom use. For this topic, we suggest Chapter 2 Fighting for Classics (see link below), including topics: Race, Reason and Classics, A Herculean Task, Greek for Ex-slaves, A Pick Instead of Latin and Greek? The Quest for a Desegregated Republic of Letters, and Classics and Activism. Touches on John Calhoun, Phillis Wheatley, Mary Church Terrell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, the Black intellect, and debating the best education for African Americans.  

    NCLG offers Quotes and Reflections: Study Guides 1-5  with reflection questions for students to answer on each quoted selection. Direct links to all 5 discussion guides are listed at the top of each NCLG Study Guide: Introduction   Fighting for Classics   Refiguring Classical Resistance   Ancient and Modern Slavery  Constructing History / Afterword  Study Guides are C-RM  Grades9-16