Angel Adams Parham and Anika Prather. 2022. The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature. Camp Hill, PA: Classical Academic Press.
While leftist academics seek to “decolonize the curriculum” because of the supposed ubiquity of racism in our great literature, some of the responses defending the study of the great books have only played into this stereotype. Christian homeschool groups championing classical conversations, for instance, have drawn from sources like Doug Wilson, a man who has also taken issue with the violent overthrow of slavery and defends Southern planters who appealed to the Bible to defend their authority. The battle lines appear to have been drawn clearly enough. And yet, following fast on the footsteps of Roosevelt Montas’s Rescuing Socrates comes Angel Parham and Anika Prather’s The Black Intellectual Tradition: Reading Freedom in Classical Literature, a work that defends the study of the classics from a uniquely Black American perspective.
The shocking thing about The Black Intellectual Tradition is that the case for Black engagement with the classics is so much easier to make than our current curriculum warfare would have us believe. The first wave of freedmen were classically educated, as were those standout Black writers who were able to break through and become educated under adverse circumstances. Phyllis Wheatley, one of the first women to publish a book in the United States and a renowned poetess, went to school along with her mistress’s children and had an excellent grasp of English literature and Latin. Frederick Douglass stole The Columbian Orator from his master in order to extend his own reading in secret, which included speeches by everyone from Socrates to Cicero to John Milton to Benjamin Franklin. Anna Julia Cooper defended the teaching of classics to Black children at the famous M Street High School in Washington, D.C. (which became Dunbar High School), and as president of Frelinghuysen University, a historically Black university. And Martin Luther King Jr. read and taught the European tradition of political philosophy, grappling with Plato, Rousseau, and Marx. Finally, Toni Morrison, in her Song of Solomon, inserts mythic references to Circe, the Cyclops, and of course, Christian scripture. Running through all of the writers Parham discusses in part 1 of the book is the Christian faith. It shows how the Black American tradition has always threaded the needle between the bitterness of oppression and the hope of a shared future through the Christian faith. As women of faith themselves, Parham and Prather are especially well placed to draw out this aspect of the tradition that is so pivotal to the way that freedmen chose to embrace the very country that had so oppressed them. This is no easy feat.
The story of Olaudah Equiano and his narrative of being captured and brought to the West serves as an excellent foundation for Parham’s section on truth. Equiano’s sincere conversion to the Christian faith is held in tension with his genuine disdain for the nominal Christianity of the white “masters.” Unbeknownst to many white Christians today, Black Christians throughout American history considered the Black church to have the true gospel, while seeing the white church (with exceptions) as mired in the sins of cruelty and injustice. Wheatley is sometimes criticized because her writing condemning slavery is more obscure, while her well-known poems seem to praise the Europeans as having something superior to offer displaced Africans. But Parham’s religious sensibilities allow her to read Wheatley more accurately: when she dreams of Africans receiving the “precious crumbs” that fall from the table of the “children of the kingdome,” she is obviously referring to the famous conversation between Jesus and the gentile woman in Mark 7:24–30. Wheatley is creating a parallel between white Americans and Pharisees, who have the truth but do not really understand it. Black Christians are like the gentile woman, whose deep faith and gratitude impress the Messiah himself. Parham practices this kind of retrieval throughout part 1, pushing back against ideologically totalizing readings favored by our reactionary moment. In tone, this entire work fights hard to stand on the razor’s edge between legitimate lament about past exclusion and abuse, and hope for a future together as part of a shared American project. Parham and Prather make a powerful case that there is no better way to proceed than to pursue a path in which the contributions of Black Americans are seamlessly interwoven into a classical curriculum, and Black children are invited into the great conversation.
Anika Prather focuses on Anna Julia Cooper’s work, tying her efforts to teach and defend a pro-Black classical curriculum to the dogged determination of the Proverbs 31 woman. Just as Parham shares her experiences bringing the classics to under-resourced Black children through her Nyasa program, Prather has both worked in and founded Black classical schools, including her Living Waters School in Washington, D.C. She describes her own conversion from the assumption that the classics were racist, her persecution when she proposed Black educators’ use of the classics as her dissertation topic, and her determination to present the shared study of classics as a healing balm for America’s painful racial divide. By reviewing the travails of both Cooper and Prather herself in bringing the classics to Black children, we see the power of the metaphysical and moral grounding that a study of the classics provides. Current approaches pale in comparison, many of which, with all their political correctness, cannot help but convey that children from certain backgrounds are somehow less capable of excellence than others. With a gentle defiance, Parham and Prather have invited us into a world of education steeped in the civilizational traditions we all share. This invitation will prove challenging for both right- and left-leaning philosophies of education. And this is exactly what we need.
Rachel Ferguson
Concordia University Chicago
rachel.ferguson@cuchicago.edu