The Classical Education of African Americans: The Unexplored Classical Tradition in Asheville, North Carolina

Rhonda N. Espie (University of North Carolina, Asheville)

African Americans are currently underrepresented in the academic field of Classics, as educators and as students. A few sources, nevertheless, reveal that there is a rich heritage of African American contribution to the Classical tradition that until recently had gone unexplored. We now have the works of Michele Valerie Ronnick, who has conducted archival research on well over a dozen black Classicists from the 18^th to the 20^th centuries, including the first professional classicist of African American descent, William Sanders Scarborough (1852-1926), and others who are beginning to engage in this research, but large gaps remain in our knowledge of this topic.

North Carolina is an important site for recovering the African-American contribution to the Classical tradition, since it goes as far back as John Chavis (1763-1838) who taught Latin and Greek to both white and black students in 1805 in a Classical school that he opened in Raleigh, North Carolina.

There is evidence of the Classical tradition at Allen High School in Asheville, North Carolina. At its inception in 1860, The Allen School focused on the primary education of African Americans. In 1887, the Women’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church the converted the school to a boarding school for African American girls. Initially, the Allen School’s curriculum focused on ensuring that students graduated from Allen proficient in domestic management skills. By 1924, however, Allen became an accredited high school by the State of North Carolina and the Southern Association of Secondary Schools and Colleges, and its educational philosophy and curriculum changed in order to prepare its students for college. Because of forced integration of schools, Allen High School closed abruptly in 1974 and none of the school’s records were preserved. I have been able to recover some through archival research and face-to face interviews with former students and teachers, including one of the Latin teachers.

Despite the competing national educational philosophies associated with African American education at the time, economic stability (Booker T. Washington) vs. liberal arts and leadership (William Sanders Scarborough and W.E.B. Du Bois) (Ronnick, A Look at Booker T. Washington's Attitude Toward the Study of Greek and Latin by People of African Ancestry, 2002), not only did Allen High School adopt a liberal arts focus towards its curriculum but also offered Latin as one of its foreign language electives. Why did Allen High School choose to offer Latin? Did administrators through the Methodist Church meet to discuss the benefits of Latin and add it to the school’s curriculum? What were the students’ experiences in the Latin classroom?

Answers to these questions are important because they are part of the first steps towards preserving the history of the Classical tradition in the African American community in Asheville, North Carolina. This paper builds upon the work of Ronnick and will describe the preliminary results of my research about Latin education at Allen High School.

20 minutes digital projector. Topic Code: RC