Race, Recovery, and Hope

Abstract

Race, Recovery, and Hope Shelley P. Haley and Sheila (Bridget) Murnaghan keywords archives, Baltimore, Helen Maria Chesnutt, John Wesley Gilbert, race, racism, William Sanders Scarborough 1. BACKGROUND TO THE PRESIDENTIAL PANEL OF SHEILA (BRIDGET) MURNAGHAN (2020) AND OF SHELLEY P. HALEY (2021) two incidents, one of racial profiling and another—in the most charitable of readings—of racially inflammatory speech, occurred during the sesquicentennial meeting of the Society of Classical Studies in January 2019. Those two incidents became central to shaping the leadership going forward. They spurred Haley to stand for election as President-Elect via petition and once elected, to work with Bridget Murnaghan (President, 2020) on consecutive presidential panels focusing on race and the APA/SCS. Furthermore, both Bridget and Shelley presented their panels under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants. The disproportionate effect the pandemic has had on Black and Brown communities made our topic even more salient. 2. WILLIAM SANDERS SCARBOROUGH AND BLACK CLASSICISM AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (BRIDGET MURNAGHAN) This pair of presidential panels had its origins in discussions among the SCS Board of Directors about how best to acknowledge the shameful incident in 1909 when the APA—as the SCS was then known—met in Baltimore, and William Sanders Scarborough, an eminent Classicist and the President of Wilberforce University, was disinvited from the conference banquet and [End Page 295] therefore chose not to attend the conference or deliver his scheduled paper. This happened because, as the chair of the local arrangements committee put it, "The Hotel Belvedere will not undertake to serve a dinner at which members of your race might be present." The SCS board wanted to do more than issue a belated apology. We needed a way of responding that would have intellectual substance and would give serious consideration to what was lost when colleagues like Scarborough were excluded from full participation in our profession and—until far too recently—from the institutional memory of our discipline. Our sense of urgency about this was reinforced by the incidents of the 2019 annual meeting in San Diego, which ruled out any easy assumption that, more than a century after that Baltimore incident, race was no longer a bar to full acceptance in Classical Studies. When Shelley Haley became the SCS President-Elect, she and I decided that we would devote both of our presidential panels to this project. The first of the two, entitled "William Sanders Scarborough and Black Classicism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," took its bearings quite closely from that 1909 incident. It was especially meaningful for me personally because I grew up in Baltimore, in a cityscape still dominated in one of its central sections by the towering presence of the Belvedere Hotel, and I remain attached to my hometown, with its volatile history and complicated cultural geography. I was pleased that I was able to recruit a diverse group of speakers who were mostly not SCS regulars. These included: Michele Valerie Ronnick, Professor of Classics at Wayne State University, a leading expert on Scarborough himself and the editor of his autobiography and collected papers, as well as an energetic pioneer in raising awareness of the rich tradition of Black classicism; Andre Davis, one of Baltimore's foremost Black civic leaders, with a distinguished legal career as a private practitioner, US Attorney, law professor, federal judge, and Baltimore City Solicitor; John W. I. Lee, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of a new book The First Black Archeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert on Scarborough's contemporary, the first Black member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens; and Ashley Hairston, Associate Dean for Academic Advising and University Professor at Wake Forest University, the author of a groundbreaking study of African American classical reception The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West. Given the origins of the panel, it was fitting that Andre ended his presentation by reading Countee Cullen's 1925 poem "Incident." This brief lyric evokes the experience of being a carefree boy in "old Baltimore" until being attacked with the most vicious of...