African Americans and the Classics by Margaret Malamud

Author:Margaret Malamud [Malamud, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Literary Criticism, Ancient & Classical, Social Science, Black Studies (Global), African American & Black, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Ancient, General
ISBN: 9781788315791
Google: PHmGDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-01-24T01:12:40+00:00

From his reading of classical texts, Russwurm concluded that the Greeks and their gods did not view African Americans as inferior; rather, they saw them as learned, pious, and civilized. In his conclusion, Russwurm summarized for his readers, ‘we have sufficiently proved to the satisfaction of every unprejudiced mind, that the Egyptians and Ethiopians were of one colour … and were equally civilized’.39 Modern black people, he believed, were the descendants of these people and, though they might be degraded and despised, the ‘mutability of human affairs’ suggests they will rise again. Like Herodotus (and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historians), Russwurm had a cyclical view of history, a view that implied that the wretched condition of the descendants of ancient Egyptians was likely to change for the better and eventually result in their return to glory. Thus, from the very beginning of the abolitionist press in 1827, black newspapers featured articles asserting the influence of Egypt on Greece and Rome to argue against widespread white assertions of black racial inferiority.

Newspaper articles and editorials also argued that there was an absence of racial prejudice in Antiquity. For instance, in 1837, in an article in the Coloured American newspaper entitled ‘Prejudice against colour in the light of history’, the author asked rhetorically and sarcastically:

To whom did the Greeks and Romans look up, for instruction in letters, in the arts? To the Egyptians! Where did the wealthy citizens of Rome and Athens … send off their princely sons for education, as some among us now send their sons to the universities in Europe? They sent them to Egypt – to Ethiopia. But who are those Egyptians and Ethiopians? Negroes! Yes, negroes; with woolly hair, flat noses and jetty skins; for thus are they described by Herodotus, the prince of historians, who journied [sic] among them.40

This anonymous author argued that the superiority of Egyptian civilization, and its appeal to Greeks and Romans, revealed the accomplishments of ancient Africans, and demonstrated that the modern prejudice against African Americans did not exist in Antiquity.41

Taking up this same point, another contributor to the Coloured American termed racial prejudice in America ‘colourphobia’ and turned to Classics to make his point:

Anti-black passion is, we are told, ‘a law of nature’, and not to be trifled with! ‘Prejudice against colour’ ‘a law of nature!’ Forsooth! What a sinner against nature old Homer was! He goes off in ecstasies in his description, of the black Ethiopians, praises their beauty, calls them the favorites of the gods … What impious trifling with this sacred ‘law’ was perpetrated by the old Greeks, who represented Minerva, their favorite goddess of Wisdom, as an African princess … How little reverence for this sublime ‘law’ had Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, and those other master spirits of ancient Greece, who, in their pilgrimage after knowledge, went to Ethiopia and Egypt, and sat at the feet of black philosophers to drink in wisdom … this ‘law of nature’ was never heard of till long after the commencement of the African slave trade.

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