The Classics in Black and White
Black Colleges, Classics Education, Resistance, and Assimilation
Eugene O'Connor author Kenneth W Goings author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Georgia Press
Published:15th May '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
A study of the classics curriculum in Black colleges formed after the Civil War
Following emancipation, African Americans continued their quest for an education by constructing schools and colleges for Black students, mainly in the U.S. South, to acquire the tools of literacy, but beyond this, to enroll in courses in the Greek and Latin classics, then the major curriculum at American liberal arts colleges and universities.
Following emancipation, African Americans continued their quest for an education by constructing schools and colleges for Black students, mainly in the U.S. South, to acquire the tools of literacy, but beyond this, to enroll in courses in the Greek and Latin classics, then the major curriculum at American liberal arts colleges and universities. Classically trained African Americans from the time of the early U.S. republic had made a link between North Africa and the classical world; therefore, from almost the beginning of their quest for a formal education, many African Americans believed that the classics were their rightful legacy.
The Classics in Black and White is based extensively on the study of course catalogs of colleges founded for Black people after the Civil War by Black churches, largely White missionary societies and White philanthropic organizations. Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O’Connor uncover the full extent of the colleges’ classics curriculums and showcase the careers of prominent African American classicists, male and female, and their ultimately unsuccessful struggle to protect the liberal arts from being replaced by Black conservatives and White power brokers with vocational instruction such as woodworking for men and domestic science for women. This move to eliminate classics was in large part motivated by the very success of the colleges’ classics programs. As Goings and O’Connor’s survey of Black colleges’ curriculums and texts reveals, the lessons they taught were about more than declensions and conjugations—they imparted the tools of self-formation and self-affirmation.
The Classics in Black and White highlights the way public education and public classical education developed to support Black liberation and citizenship. This is especially important in a time when we see so many more inroads being made to dismantle public education because it is the great equalizer for racial and economic justice in the United States. Goings and O'Connor reveal many of the reasons behind this continued push and the White supremacism that is the root.
* author of Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City *I have been craving a book like this one! Having yielded ample rewards before, the collaboration between Goings and O’Connor delivers once again, this time with a study that details the (shifting and sometimes star-crossed) commitment of Black colleges and universities to humanistic and specifically classical education in the seventy years that bridged Reconstruction to the eve of World War II.
* author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy LeagISBN: 9780820366616
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
192 pages