Excerpts follow:
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 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. "The onus of intense color prejudice
cannot be placed upon the shoulders of the ancients," he wrote.
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.
William Harris, a Columbia University professor who specializes in
Greek and Roman history, said Dr. Snowden was the first person to
write in a serious way about blacks in antiquity, and his books
influenced other scholars, including George M. Fredrickson ("Racism:
A Short History") and Martin Bernal ("Black Athena").
However, Harris said: "Snowden really wanted to find a world in
antiquity which was without the plague that inflicted America
throughout its history, and he pushed the evidence too far to find an
ideal pre-modern, pre-medieval world. There was undoubtedly some
racism in antiquity, but he talked it down to being minimal. . . . He
was right, to a point."
M.I. Finley, an eminent Cambridge University classicist, once wrote
in The Washington Post that "Blacks in Antiquity" tended toward
overstatement but that it was "at least something" in a
much-neglected field.
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.
"If you look in the Harvard Library index under Plato, you find one
card that says, 'See Snowden,' " he liked to joke in later years.
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.
Time magazine reported that his appointment combated "two of the
standard Communist-propaganda charges against" the United States,
"that 1) Americans are materialistic and cultureless, 2) the Negroes
are downtrodden."
His appointment did not prevent condescending attitudes from
occasionally emerging. According to a news attache at the embassy,
one visiting congressman appeared to criticize Dr. Snowden for
writing his doctoral thesis on slavery in the Roman Empire.
"Well, since you are a Negro, I suppose that was of special interest
to you," the congressman said.
"Actually, my special interest was in the fact that nearly all of the
slaves in ancient Rome were white," Dr. Snowden said.
The congressman stomped off.
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.
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