Purdue News

April 2, 2004

Exhibit, speaker honors first African-Americans to teach classics

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University's Classical Studies Program will sponsor a photo exhibit and guest lecturer to honor African-Americans who made great achievements in education at the end of the Civil War.

The exhibit, "12 Blacks Classicists: Honoring African-American Intellectuals Who Made Groundbreaking Achievements in Academia at the Turn of the Civil War," will be in display cases on April 19-30 in Stewart Center's Fowler Hall.

The exhibit, which was created by Michele Valerie Ronnick, associate professor of Greek and Latin classics at Wayne State University in Detroit, focuses on 12 African-American men and women who taught Greek and Latin at the university level. Ronnick will present a public lecture about the exhibit at 3 p.m. on April 26 at the Black Cultural Center, Multipurpose Room 1.

"These academics' accomplishments helped pave the way for future generations of African-Americans entering American universities to study the classics," says Patrice Rankine, assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures and a member of the interdisciplinary program in classics at Purdue.

Featured African-American academics in the exhibit include William Sanders Scarborough, the first black member of the Modern Language Association and author of a Greek textbook; Lewis Baxter Moore, who earned the first doctorate awarded by the University of Pennsylvania to an African-American for his work on the Greek tragedian Sophocles; Wiley Lane, the first black professor of Greek at Howard University; and John Wesley Gilbert, who was the first black to attend the American School in Athens, Greece.

The exhibit, which will travel the United States for the next two years, was funded by the James Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University.

CONTACT: Rankine, (765) 496-3993, rankine@purdue.edu

Writer: Amy Patterson-Neubert, (765) 494-9723, apatterson@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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