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Frank
M. Snowden Jr.,
Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman
Experience. Belknap Press, 2005.
Frank M. Snowden Jr .,
Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks.
Harvard University Press; Reprint edition, 1991.
Adelaide M Cromwell., The
Other Brahmins : Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950.
Fayetteville : University of Arkansas Press, 1994.
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* *
Frank Snowden Now An Ancestor
Major Scholar of Blacks in Antiquity
Frank M. Snowden
Jr., 95, a Howard University classicist for almost 50
years whose research into blacks in ancient Greece and
Rome opened a new field of study, died Feb. 18 [2007] at
the Grand Oaks assisted living home in Washington. He
had congestive heart failure.
As a black man, Dr.
Snowden was a rarity in classics, but ancient history
consumed him since his youth as a prize-winning student
at the Boston Latin School and later at Harvard
University. His body of work led to a National
Humanities Medal in 2003, a top government honor for
scholars, writers, actors and artists.
Much of his
scholarship centered on one point: that blacks in the
ancient world seemed to have been spared the virulent
racism common to later Western civilization. . . .
Dr. Snowden's most
notable books are "Blacks
in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience"
(1970), which took him 15 years to research, and "Before
Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks."
(1983). Both were published by Harvard University Press.
Using evidence he
found in literature and art, he showed that blacks were
able not only to coexist with Greeks and Romans but also
were often revered as charioteers, fighters and actors.
Because Romans and
Greeks first encountered blacks as soldiers and
mercenaries and not slaves or "savages," they did not
classify them as inferior and seek ways to rationalize
their enslavement, he said. . . .
Frank Martin
Snowden Jr. was born July 17, 1911, in York County, Va.
He was raised in Boston, where his father, a former Army
Department civilian who specialized in race relations,
became a businessman.
He graduated in
1932 from Harvard University, where he won a classics
prize for an essay he signed "Plato" because anonymous
submission was required. . . .
At Harvard, Dr.
Snowden also received a master's degree in classics in
1933 and a doctorate in 1944. His doctoral dissertation
on slavery and freedom in Pompeii formed the basis of
his later scholarship.
After early
teaching jobs at what was then Virginia State College in
Petersburg and Atlanta's Spelman College, he joined the
Howard faculty in 1942 and spent many years as classics
department chairman. From 1956 to 1968, Dr. Snowden was
dean of Howard's College of Liberal Arts, overseeing all
undergraduate programs. He helped start the school's
honors program.
Starting in the
late 1960s, Dr. Snowden was criticized by more militant
students and teachers for his disapproval of
Afrocentrism, a movement to highlight the roots of black
culture often at the expense of white European
civilization. Some historians likened Afrocentric
teaching to "ethnic cheerleading," a position Dr.
Snowden also held.
"If you're white
and you criticize Afrocentrism, you're a Eurocentrist
racist," he said. "If you're black and criticize it,
you're a black duped by white scholarship." Above all,
he thought that Afrocentrism read "20th-century biases
back into antiquity and by seeing color prejudice where
none existed."
During the Vietnam
War era, Howard, like other universities, attracted
student protests over the war and academic concerns. As
a faculty leader, Dr. Snowden was a frequent target of
student anger, and at one point he was hanged in effigy
with university President James M. Nabrit Jr. and
Selective Service director Lewis B. Hershey. He resigned
his deanship soon after. . . .
Dr. Snowden was
fluent in Latin, Greek, German, French and Italian. He
first visited Italy in 1938, when he won a Rosenwald
fellowship, and went back a decade later as a Fulbright
scholar. A frequent lecturer abroad on State
Department-sponsored tours, he was named cultural
attache at the U.S. Embassy to Rome in 1953 at the
urging of Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce. . . .
Dr. Snowden was
married to the former Elaine Hill, a high school art
teacher, from 1935 until her death in 2005.
Survivors include two children, Jane Lepscky of
Washington and Frank M. Snowden III of New Haven, Conn.;
four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
—Adam
Bernstein, "Frank Snowden; Major Scholar of Blacks in
Antiquity."
Washington Post, 22 February 2007.
* *
* * *
Other Sources:
Howard University Library. Harriet
Jackson Scarupa. "Blacks in the Classical World:
Snowden's 50-year Search.
American Vision, 2, No.5 (October 1987): 20-26.
* *
* * *
Frank
M. Snowden Jr .,
Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman
Experience. Belknap Press, 2005.
The Africans who
came to ancient Greece and Italy participated in an
important chapter of classical history. Although
evidence indicated that the alien dark- and
black-skinned people were of varied tribal and
geographic origins, the Greeks and Romans classified
many of them as Ethiopians. In an effort to determine
the role of black people in ancient civilization, Mr.
Snowden examines a broad span of Greco-Roman
experience--from the Homeric era to the age of
Justinian--focusing his attention on the Ethiopians as
they were known to the Greeks and Romans. The author
dispels unwarranted generalizations about the
Ethiopians, contending that classical references to them
were neither glorifications of a mysterious people nor
caricatures of rare creatures.
Mr. Snowden has
probed literary, epigraphical, papyrological,
numismatic, and archaeological sources and has
considered modern anthropological and sociological
findings on pertinent racial and intercultural problems.
He has drawn directly upon the widely scattered literary
evidence of classical and early Christian writers and
has synthesized extensive and diverse material. Along
with invaluable reference notes, Mr. Snowden has
included over 140 illustrations which depict the Negro
as the Greeks and Romans conceived of him in mythology
and religion and observed him in a number of
occupations--as servant, diplomat, warrior, athlete, and
performer, among others.
Presenting an exceptionally comprehensive historical
description of the first major encounter of Europeans
with dark and black Africans, Mr. Snowden found that the
black man in a predominantly white society was neither
romanticized nor scorned--that the Ethiopian in
classical antiquity was considered by pagan and
Christian without prejudice.
—Publisher
*
* * * *
Here's a book to raise the spirits of anyone of African
descent who feels that he or she has nothing to do with
the making of Western civilization. Frank M. Snowden
Jr., a world-renowned scholar on ancient Greece and Rome
who taught at Howard and Georgetown Universities,
details with encyclopedic and painstaking scholarship
and research the undeniable presence of Africans in the
Greco-Roman world. "The experiences of those Africans
who reached the alien shores of Greece and Italy
constituted an important chapter in the history of
classical antiquity," he writes. Using evidence from
terra cotta figures, paintings, and classical sources
like Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, Snowden proves,
contrary to our modern assumptions, that Greco-Romans
did not view Africans with racial contempt. Many
Africans worked in the Roman Empire as musicians,
artisans, scholars, and generals as well as slaves, and
they were noted as much for their virtue as for their
appearance of having a "burnt face" (from which came the
Greek name Ethiopian).
—Amazon
* * * *
*
Frank M. Snowden Jr .,
Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks.
Harvard University Press; Reprint edition, 1991.
In this richly
illustrated account of black-white contacts from the
Pharaohs to the Caesars, Frank Snowden demonstrates that
the ancients did not discriminate against blacks because
of their color. For three thousand years Mediterranean
whites intermittently came in contact with African
blacks in commerce and war, and left a record of these
encounters in art and in written documents. The
blacks--most commonly known as Kushites, Ethiopians, or
Nubians--were redoubtable warriors and commanded the
respect of their white adversaries. The overall view of
blacks was highly favorable. In science, philosophy, and
religion color was not the basis of theories concerning
inferior peoples. And early Christianity saw in the
black man a dramatic symbol of its catholic mission.
This book sheds light on the reasons for the absence in
antiquity of virulent color prejudice and for the
difference in attitudes of whites toward blacks in
ancient and modern societies.
—Publisher
* * * *
*
Further developing the themes he so eloquently outlines
in
Blacks in Antiquity,
Frank M. Snowden Jr. continues his investigations into
attitudes towards Africans in the classical
civilizations of Rome and Greece. Snowden identifies the
African blacks from Egypt, Nubia (the modern Sudan),
Ethiopia, and Carthage (Tunisia), discussing their
interactions--including intermarriage--with the
Greco-Romans. (He also notes that many of the artistic
representations of these people resemble present-day
African Americans.) From the trade missions of the
Egyptian dynasties to their conquest of the
Mediterranean and ultimate downfall at the hands of the
Romans, Snowden unravels a complex history of cultural
exchanges that went on for several millennia in which
racial prejudice was not a factor. "There was a
clear-cut respect among the Mediterranean peoples for
Ethiopians and their way of life," he writes, "and above
all, the ancients did not stereotype blacks as
primitives defective in religion and culture."
—Amazon
posted 1 March 2007 |
