The Classics in Black and White: Black Colleges, Classics Education, Resistance, and Assimilation

by Kenneth W. Goings, Eugene O'Connor

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.

Genres: History

282 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 15, 2024

Reviews

[Elena Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O’Connor’s The Classics in Black and White: Black Colleges, Classics Education, Resistance, and Assimilation is a brilliant, long-overdue contribution to American educational history, African American studies, and the history of classical scholarship. Spanning 282 pages, this volume explores how newly emancipated African Americans claimed Greek and Latin classics as their rightful legacy linking North Africa to the classical world and built rigorous liberal arts curricula across post-Civil War Black colleges.

What makes this work so vital is its deep archival foundation, utilizing course catalogs from institutions founded by Black churches, missionary societies, and philanthropic organizations. Goings and O'Connor expertly chart the successful careers of early Black classicists while detailing the political and institutional battles that sought to replace liberal arts education with vocational training. This book is an essential, deeply moving read for historians of education, classicists, scholars of African American history, and university research libraries.