Works of William Sanders Scarborough: Black Classicist and Race Leader »

Michele Valerie Ronnick is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics, Greek and Latin at Wayne State University. A Latinist by training with a book on Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes, she has published widely in journals here and abroad and has won a number of professional awards for excellence in scholarship, teaching and service on regional and national levels. Ronnick's special interest in the Classical Tradition led her to open up a new subfield of reception studies, Classica Africana, a.k.a. black classicism, which examines the influence of classics upon the creative and professional lives of people of African descent. She is the editor of a critical edition of The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough.

The first professional classicist of African American descent, William Sanders Scarborough rose from slavery to become president of Wilberforce University in Ohio. Excelling at Latin and Greek, he crossed the color line both socially and intellectually with his entry into a field of study commonly seen as elitist and dominated by white men. Although unknown to classicists today, Scarborough had a distinguished career in the field and held membership in many learned societies and had an active publication record. His life as an engaged intellectual, public citizen, and concerned educator was admired and emulated by W. E. B. Du Bois.

This collection, which spans a half a century from the end of Reconstruction through the vagaries of World War I and the rise of Jim Crow, gives us window we have not had before into the challenges and ambiguities of this period. As a committed intellectual, concerned educator and loyal citizen, he served as an ambassador to and for his race to several generations of people both in the U.S and abroad. In Scarborough's writings we have a portrait of a man whose struggle for physical and intellectual freedom can inform us all.