Frank M. Snowden Jr.

1911-2007

Educator, historian, author

Frank M. Snowden Jr. was a highly respected professor whose studies of blacks among the ancient Greeks and Romans revolutionized the subject. The first scholar to collect and evaluate hundreds of widely scattered depictions of blacks in ancient literature and art, Snowden argued, usually persuasively, that color prejudice was not a powerful force in the Greco-Roman world. Subsequent scholars have found fault with some of his conclusions, but nearly all acknowledge the importance of his contributions.

Born in York County, Virginia, on July 17, 1911, to Frank M. Snowden, an army officer, and Alice Phillips Snowden, Snowden moved with his family to Boston while still a child. His training in classical languages and culture began at the Boston Latin School, where he excelled. From Boston Latin he moved on to Harvard University, where he majored in classics, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1932 and a master's degree the following year. After Snowden wrote a dissertation on slaves and freedmen in the Roman city of Pompeii, Harvard granted him a Ph.D. in 1944.

His first teaching position, at the historically black Virginia State College (now Virginia State University) in Petersburg, lasted from 1933 to 1936, when he accepted a job at another historically black school, Spelman College in Atlanta. Snowden later moved to a third black-majority institution, Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he taught classics for many decades. As his former student Michael R. Winston pointed out in the Washington Post, however, Snowden did more than teach. An eloquent speaker, gifted administrator, and passionate believer in the value of a liberal arts education, he also worked tirelessly to uphold academic standards across the university and the nation. "In the 1950s and 1960s," Winston wrote, "he emerged as a national leader in the effort to stem creeping vocationalism [the replacement of subjects like literature with career-oriented subjects like accounting] in liberal arts colleges, insisting that the general education program required of all freshmen and sophomores [at Howard] include classical literature in English translation, to be followed by serious study of foreign languages and literatures."

Over the course of his Howard career, Snowden held a series of important administrative positions. From 1942 to 1948, for example, he was director of the evening school and adult education—an especially important position in wartime, when military service or war-related employment prevented many students from attending daytime classes. His most prominent role, however, was as dean of the college of liberal arts, a position he held from 1956 to 1968, when he resigned in the face of angry student protest. In retrospect, it seems clear that the students were not angry with Snowden himself but with the administration he represented. At a time when students across the country were protesting what they saw as their schools' complicity in the Vietnam War, it was not unusual for university officials to face vivid, often hurtful expressions of their students' anger. Snowden himself was hanged at least once in effigy, as was university president James M. Nabritt Jr. While the campus soon returned to relative calm, the incident seems to have been a traumatic one for Snowden, hence his resignation of the deanship shortly thereafter.

Snowden enjoyed a vigorous career outside Howard. In 1953 he embarked on the first of several lecture tours for the U.S. Department of State, visiting nations in western Africa, northern Africa, and Europe. The following year, at the end of his first tour, he was appointed cultural attaché to the American embassy in Rome, a position he held until 1956. As Adam Bernstein noted in the Washington Post, Snowden's lectures had an explicit propaganda value for the U.S. government, then struggling to contain the growth of Communism. Pointing out the political advantage of Snowden's cultural attaché appointment to Rome, Bernstein referenced a 1954 Time magazine report (which uses the racial terminology of the time): "In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, two of the standard Communist-propaganda charges against the U.S. are that 1) Americans are materialistic and cultureless, 2) the Negroes are downtrodden. Last week the U.S. Information Agency fended off two stones with one appointment." Snowden continued to deliver occasional lectures on behalf of the United States until 1968.

Much of Snowden's time after 1968 was occupied in writing the books for which he is best known. The first of these, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience, was based on nearly two decades of research. Using a wide variety of artistic, archaeological, and literary evidence, Snowden argued that racism based on skin color was largely unknown in the Greco-Roman world. "Greek and Roman authors were neither color-blind nor color-prejudiced," Snowden wrote in a 1987 essay for the Howard University Library System on the influence of his first book. "They had the ability to see and to comment on obvious physical differences without seeing in the color of the skin a basis for prejudice…. Blacks experienced no handicaps in fundamental social relations, nor did they suffer detrimental distinctions that excluded them from opportunities—occupational, economic, or cultural—available to other newcomers in alien lands."

Snowden's later books and scholarly articles were largely an elaboration of these ideas. His peers in the largely white world of classical scholarship generally responded favorably, though some felt Snowden's evidence was too weak to support his conclusions. Even these critics, however, were generally grateful to Snowden for introducing a subject that had been long neglected. Blacks were everywhere in the ancient Mediterranean, particularly in imperial Rome, and they often held positions of considerable authority. Rome had black soldiers, black merchants, and black doctors, though, as Snowden himself pointed out many times, very few black slaves. By reintroducing these individuals as figures worthy of study, Snowden reinvigorated the world of classics and brought the insights of the ancients to bear on one of the most intractable problems—color prejudice—of the modern world.

At a Glance …

Born Frank Martin Snowden Jr. on July 17, 1911, in York County, Virginia; died on February 18, 2007, in Washington, DC; son of Frank M. Snowden (a U.S. Army officer) and Alice Phillips Snowden; married Elaine Hill (a high school teacher), June 8, 1935 (died 2005); children: Jane Alice, Frank M. III. Education: Harvard University, BA, classics, 1932, MA, classics, 1933, PhD, classics, 1944.

Career: Virginia State College, Petersburg, classics instructor, 1933-36; Spelman College, Atlanta, GA, classics instructor, 1936-40; Howard University, Washington, DC, instructor, 1942-44, director of evening school and adult education, 1942-48, associate professor, 1944-45, professor, 1945-77, dean of College of Liberal Arts, 1956-68, and distinguished professor of classics, 1977-2007; cultural attaché, United States embassy, Rome, 1954-56; frequent lecture tours for U.S. Department of State, 1950s-1960s.

Selected memberships: American Philological Association, board of directors, 1976-79; American Archaeological Institute, vice president, 1968-70, and president, 1970-71, of Washington, DC, chapter; American Council on Education; American Academy in Rome.

Selected awards: Rosenwald Fund, fellowship, 1938; Fulbright Program, research fellowship, 1949-50; Medaglia d'Oro, Government of Italy, 1958; American Council of Learned Societies, fellowship, 1962-63; National Endowment for the Humanities, research grant, 1970; Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit, American Philological Association, 1973; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, research fellowship, 1977; National Humanities Medal, U.S. Government, 2003.

Snowden received several honors throughout his career, perhaps the most important of which was the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2003. Snowden died in Washington, D.C., on February 18, 2007, at the age of ninety-five.

Selected writings

Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience, Harvard University Press, 1970.

(With Jean Leclant, Jean Vercoutter, and Jehan Desanges) The Image of the Black in Western Art I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire, Morrow, 1976.

Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks, Harvard University Press, 1983.

Sources

Books

Keita, Maghan, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Periodicals

New York Times, February 28, 2007.

Time, August 30, 1954.

Washington Post, February 22, 2007, p.B07; March 11, 2007, p.B08.

Online

Snowden Jr., Frank M., "Blacks in the Ancient Greek and Roman World," Howard University Library System, http://www.howard.edu/library/Special/Excellence@Howard/Snowden/Blacks.htm (accessed February 21, 2008).

—R. Anthony Kugler