We should reject the notion that the Western classical tradition has nothing to offer African Americans.
We should reject the notion that the Western classical tradition has nothing to offer African Americans.
B lack History Month is a time to reflect on the African American experience — our culture, struggles, redemption, and victories. But how we approach this history matters, immensely.
Too often we present black history as something separate from, or supplemental to, capital-H history. But black history is not a sidebar. The black experience is not only immutably integrated in the American experiment. It is profoundly meaningful to questions at the center of the Western canon and the human experience — questions, about freedom, justice, goodness, truth, and beauty, that have been asked and answered by thinkers from Socrates to Shakespeare. Situating black voices within the dialogue of the classics is critical to ensuring that African Americans today achieve the reconciliation and empowerment they deserve.
Many of my black contemporaries see a call for intellectual integration as odd, even wrong. That’s not uncommon. I used to agree that the Great Books were only for white people.
When my parents opened a classical Christian school in southern Maryland, I objected. I was a public-school teacher who viewed classical education as a philosophy rooted in racism. What could all of those “dead white males” teach black people?
Mounting dissatisfaction with teaching to annual tests and standardized curricula slowly eroded that skepticism. I started teaching at my parents’ school and witnessed black students drawing lessons from the great authors not only for their own lives but for all people.
Steeped in my doctoral research, I started having second thoughts. And when I shifted my research focus to the black classical tradition, my doctoral adviser was perplexed: “Why are you researching classical education in the black community?” “Don’t you realize that those books are not for your people?”
I stuck to my convictions and discovered that the classics not only influenced the black intellectual tradition; they were central to it. Before black Americans found freedom from slavery, through classical texts they conceived of and engaged with ideas of virtue, liberty, and the public good.
I often start with Frederick Douglass. A slave in 19th-century Maryland, Douglass learned to read, risking his life to study luminaries including Cato and John Milton. He had a heart of freedom, but reading the great works gave him the words to proclaim that liberty for himself and other black slaves.
But the interlacing of classical texts, black intellectual life, and conceptions of freedom have roots earlier than Douglass, in the early republic. We see it clearly with Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved girl brought to the American colonies in 1761 — and eventually the first African American to publish a book of poetry.
In highly unusual circumstances, Wheatley received a robust classical, liberal education, even mastering Latin. She famously wrote the poem To His Excellency General Washington, which she mailed to the general. Through the use of Greek mythology, Wheatley extols the general and his army’s fight for “freedom’s cause.” Moved, Washington replied — the only evidence of his ever writing to a slave — referring to her as “a person so favoured by the Muses,” the Greek goddesses of poetry.
To those who say that the classics don’t speak to the black community, I would note that it’s hard to separate Wheatley’s classical education from her fervent support for the principles of liberty proclaimed in the Revolution. The African-American experience may have been fraught with injustice, but we must not overlook how such a critical exchange about freedom between a slave and America’s preeminent founding father was built on an ancient foundation.
The influence of the classics spread as our nation’s history marched on. When black people in America were emancipated from slavery during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln established the Freedmen’s Bureau. Imperfect as it was, the bureau made a laudable effort to bring education to black Americans, and black colleges such as Saint Augustine’s and Howard University emerged with a classical focus. These schools understood that black people needed, for their economic advancement, more than just practical skills. They needed to open their minds to embrace and defend their hard-won freedom.
Lincoln’s assassination was a turning point in this mindset. President Andrew Johnson shut down the Freedmen’s Bureau. That action, along with Booker T. Washington’s exhortations, ushered in a new “utilitarian” attitude toward schooling — as well as a debate about education among African Americans that has never been resolved.
Even as thinkers such as Wheatley and Douglass, along with W. E. B. Dubois, Anna Julia Cooper, and other eminent educators, became strong champions for classical education, support for this traditional instruction began to wane in the latter half of the 19th century. Black schooling pivoted to a focus on training hands without engaging minds on the ultimate questions of humankind.
Over time, an even more insidious idea took hold. The classics were no longer viewed as out of reach for black Americans. Rather, they were deemed an outright enemy to black intellectual life.
We must be clear: The classics do not oppress us. Taking the classics away from us did — and we should be upset about that.
The great conversation helps put our own struggle and achievement into sharp relief so we can fully engage with our history, the good and the bad.
Today, we too often see the controversy over the Great Books play out in the classroom. Critics claim that the classics enforce a whitewashed education that encourages cultural assimilation of African Americans. But losing the dialogue between past and present isn’t a mere academic concern. It is a disruption in the equilibrium of power and persists to this day.
Black thinkers and activists from a wide range of perspectives, who shared little in common in terms of tactics, have leaned on the classics. Read the great civil-rights activists. When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote of “the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism,” he was not merely comparing the civil-rights movement to an insect. His words rang deep with meaning. King referenced Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy himself, whose pursuit of truth and justice put him in regular conflict (like a gadfly) with the authorities of his time, as we read in Plato’s Apology.
Even Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, found inspiration in Plato, learning how to read through the ancient philosopher’s seminal work The Republic. He compared Plato’s allegory to the experience of black Americans: We were being kept in the cave, allowed to see only shadows, kept from the truth of our condition or of the intellectual darkness around us. It was after this “awakening” that he began to preach his insights to others.
In his landmark book Between the World and Me (2013), Ta-Nehesi Coates reflects on Malcolm X, situating him within Greek mythology: “If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.” This classical reference is to Zeus punishing Prometheus (for stealing fire) by restraining him and letting the birds eat his insides.
Such references to the Western canon bolster our struggles for empowerment and freedom and yet are lost on those who have not grappled with classical texts — and, with it, so much of black history. The classics are not a force for subjugation. Rather, they are an instrument of freedom for black people, offering a foundation and common language to draw on as we work toward the American ideal.
Liberators such as Douglass and civil-rights activists such as King were not looking to separate from America. They wanted to be integrated into the American promise. Our ancient canon helped black Americans find their voice and then carve out a unique role in this American story. Rediscovering the place of the black intellectual tradition among the classics will lift up Americans of all colors. It will equip us with the words, ideas, spirit, and heroes of the past to help us move closer to a more perfect union.