The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West [Paperback]

“The Ebony Columnis superbly researched, skillfully utilizing primary and secondary sources and the most up-to-date scholarship. i was impressed by the amount of deep archival research that was conducted in order to complete this book.” —Cedrick May, author ofEvangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760–1835

InThe Ebony Column, Eric Ashley Hairston begins a new thread in the ongoing conversation about the influence of Greek and Roman antiquity on U.S. civilization and education. While that discussion has yielded many exceptional insights into antiquity and the American experience, it has so regularly elided the African American component that all classical influence on black writing and thought seems to vanish.

That omission, Hairston contends, is disturbing not least because of its longevity— from an early period of overt stereotyping and institutionalized racism right up to the contemporary and, one would hope, more cosmopolitan and enlightened era. Challenging and correcting that persistent shortsightedness, Hairston examines several prominent black writers’ and scholars’ deep investment in the classics as individuals, as well as the broader cultural investment in the classics and the values of the ancient world. Beginning with the late-eighteenth-century verse of Phillis Wheatley, whose classically inspired poems functioned as a kind of Trojan horse to defeat white oppression, Hairston goes on to consider the oratory of Frederick Douglass, whose rhetoric and ideas of virtue were much influenced by Cicero, and the writings of educator Anna Julia Cooper, whose classical training was a key source of her vibrant feminism. Finally, he offers a fresh examination of W. E. B. DuBois’s seminalThe Souls of Black Folk(1903) and its debt to antiquity, which volumes of commentary have lls)