The Classics, Church/College Politics, and the “Firing” of Professor William S. Scarborough

Kenneth W. Goings (Ohio State University)
and Eugene M. O’Connor (Ohio State University)

In June of 1894 W. E. B. Du Bois had just returned to the United States after finishing his studies in Germany.  Indeed, in that year he had just completed his twentieth year of schooling and, like graduates all over the United States, he was eager to get a job.  He knew better than to write to a white institution, but he did send letters of inquiry to colored public schools in Tennessee and Massachusetts, Fisk University, Lincoln University in Nebraska, and Wilberforce University in Ohio. Just as he was about to accept the Wilberforce offer, Du Bois received another offer from Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, which he turned down.  (One wonders what would have happened had he accepted Washington’s offer.)  Du Bois accepted the offer from Wilberforce, an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) school, for a number of reasons even though the money was better at Tuskegee.  First, within the segregated world of black education Wilberforce had some cachet because it was the first college created to educate Negroes.  

Second, the early faculty had been stellar, with professors from Oxford University, Edinburgh, Oberlin College, Amherst, and Mt. Holyoke. The classical education provided by Wilberforce in its early years was thought to rival that of most comparable white schools. And a third, very important reason that Du Bois chose the Wilberforce offer was the chance to work with the then most distinguished Black scholar in the United States,  William Sanders Scarborough, Professor of Classics. Although Du Bois was not himself a professional classicist, he had studied the classics for several years and felt himself capable, with Professor Scarborough’s assistance, to teach Greek and Latin. However, when he arrived in Xenia, Ohio and was met at the train station by the president of Wilberforce, he was informed that he was to become the chair of classics as Professor Scarborough was no longer Professor of Classics at the school. As Du Bois notes, that was his first introduction into “church politics” which, at a religiously affiliated school, was also college politics.

Scarborough was clearly a “public intellectual,” not only producing papers and scholarship in the classics but also being solicited for his opinion on the “race” problem.  The elements of his dismissal involved a dispute with the college president and trustees over the rigor of the classical education Scarborough still supported at a time when the president, the trustees, and funding agencies were increasingly seeing vocational education, on the Hampton-Tuskegee model, as more fitting for African Americans.  This prominence brought Scarborough into conflict with faculty colleagues as well as with a president who felt that he should be the most imminent person at the college. What this paper proposes to do is to explain the “politics”  that oversaw the removal of the most distinguished African American intellectual of his day, a nationally and even internationally recognized classicist, from his teaching position at the peak of his prominence.