Born into slavery, William Scarborough became a pioneering scholar.
William Sanders Scarborough, an 1875 graduate of Oberlin, was a pioneering African American scholar who wrote a university-level Greek textbook. Kirk Ormand, Oberlin classics professor, interviewed leading Scarborough expert Michele Ronnick, a professor at Wayne State University whose exploration of Scarborough’s biography and scholarship included trips to the Oberlin College Archives, where there are records and correspondence from Scarborough’s time at Oberlin and as president of Wilberforce University. This spring, Ronnick published a facsimile edition of Scarborough’s Greek textbook with Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers.
KO: Oh, absolutely. I’m sure we will from now on at Oberlin. I mean, how can we not? MR: The book made him famous. It’s one of the things mentioned in his obituary in the New York Times on September 12, 1926, and that he was the first member of his race to create a Greek textbook suitable for university and college use.
Kirk Ormand: You are publishing a facsimile edition of Scarborough’s Introduction to Ancient Greek. Tell us why that’s astonishing coming from a black scholar in the late 19th century. Michele Ronnick: He was a former slave, and his life could have been limited to manual labor—fixing shoes or doing some sort of menial job. So, the very fact that he
KO: How did you first get interested in Scarborough? MR: I read a brief biographical sketch of Scarborough’s life in The Dictionary of American Negro Biography. My training at Boston University with Professor [Meyer] Reinhold revealed the deep roots of the classical tradition among white people, but it quickly became clear to me that classicists had not thought to examine the
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overleaped this destiny and made himself into a learned man draws our admiration. Americans of that era believed, as philosopher David Hume did, that African American people weren’t intelligent enough to grasp Greek and Latin, which is summed up in a quote attributed to John C. Calhoun and overheard by black clergyman Alexander Crummell, who had studied Greek
at Cambridge: “If you can show me a Negro who understands the Greek syntax, I will believe that the Negro has a soul.” This embodied the sentiment of the time. Scholar and activist Anna Julia Cooper (Oberlin Class of 1884, MA 1887) knew it, and professor and attorney Richard Greener, the first black member of the American Philological Association (APA) and
ILLUS T R AT I ON BY RYA N SPR OWL
A Classical Educator
the first black graduate of Harvard who studied at Oberlin for two years in the early 1860s, knew it. He reminded Scarborough of it when he exhorted him to write his Greek textbook to “Keep at your work.” Thus, the book is material proof of Scarborough’s abilities and ambitions. He stands up and vindicates his learning as a man, his ability and his intellect, and then throws down the gauntlet to say, “this is a pathway for us, too.” The other important reason for the facsimile edition of his textbook is its rarity. There are less than 10 copies left in the world owned by certain institutional libraries. The Oberlin College Archives has one. The Library of Congress has one. Wilberforce has one. Howard University has one, and Frederick Douglass’s personal library at his home in [Washington, DC neighborhood] Anacostia has a signed copy because they were friends. The textbook is also part of the African American drive to engage in pedagogy and write their own textbooks. Scarborough is actually the first person of African American descent to write a language textbook. It was a typical book for its time, but written by a very atypical author. Wouldn’t it be fun to walk into class with such an artifact of American intellectual history?