A Portrait of Sarah C. B. Scarborough (1851-1933)

Meghan E. Curavo (Wayne State University)

The achievements of William Sanders Scarborough, black classicist, have recently come to light as a result of the publication of  The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship (Wayne State UP, 2005). More will be understood when a large selection of his published papers, titled The Selected Works of William Sanders Scarborough: Black Classicist and Race Leader  is released in the fall of 2006 by Oxford University Press. Scarborough’s wife, Sarah C. B. Scarborough, however, was an equally accomplished individual in her own right, but as of yet has not been studied.

Mrs. Scarborough, a woman of European descent, provides a fascinating portrait of a 19^th century American woman.  She was born in Danby, NY in 1851. By the age of 12, the bookish girl was reading Virgil; two years later she was married to Solomon Roper Grant, a Union soldier.  The marriage soon failed and she left her son Francis in the care of her parents to enroll in the Oswego State Teaching School.  After graduation from the Classical Course, which required study of Greek and Latin, she joined the American Missionary Association and went South to teach newly emancipated slaves. Her life, however, has received little attention by scholars and the biographical information mentioned above has never been presented in any formal  fashion. ¹  When she has been mentioned (only twice in the past 27 years), she has been misidentified as an African American woman.²  Nevertheless, her life has something to tell us about this period of American intellectual history.  Her long career teaching at Wilberforce University, her happy 44 year marriage to William Sanders Scarborough which included assistance to him proofreading Greek and translating French as well her work as a paid/published writer of women’s fiction and poetry (including membership in the Modern Language Association) indicate that it is time to set the record straight, to verify the details of her background, analyze her unusual life as an independent, courageous woman who defied social norms of the era.  

¹ This information comes from materials provided by Mrs. Scarborough’s descendent Sarah A. Grant.

² In 1979 the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Carleton Mabee stated that she was the “one black…definitely to have attended Oswego normal before the 1890s,” in his Black Education in New York State, Syracuse UP, 1979, p. 108.  In 2003 Stephanie Elise Booth listed Sarah C. B. Scarborough in her discussion of “the large number of African American women” faculty members at Wilberforce. See Buckeye Women: The History of Ohio’s Daughters, Ohio UP, 2001, p. 168.

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