A moving tribute to a legendary Howard University professor from
Sunday's Washington Post:
The obituary of Frank M. Snowden Jr. noted his pioneering scholarship on blacks in the ancient Greco-Roman world. As important as that is, it is a small part of his achievement as one of the remarkable educators of his time. For close to 50 years he shaped the thinking of thousands of Howard University students.
I can still remember vividly the day in September 1958 when he charged into a seminar room in Founders Library (he never merely walked into a classroom), dropped his green Harvard book bag on the desk and announced without preliminaries that we would begin our discussion of Homer by considering the quotation by Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things." For the next 50 minutes you could hear a pin drop as he masterfully spread before callow freshman honors students the agenda of timeless issues of character, fate and freedom that we would explore in Homer, Plato, Sophocles and Thucydides.
In the succeeding weeks, students observed a professor whose passion for teaching a subject that he regarded as a key to Western culture and history was obvious. He not only opened a world to us, he also inspired confidence in the value of intellect, the indispensability of excellence in work and in life. In that racially segregated era, his teaching and example were crucial resources for students who understood that American society placed them, by law and custom, on the margins and expected them to stay there.
Could anyone be his student and emerge with a feeling of marginality? I doubt it. He believed at the core of his being that a liberal arts education was liberating, in every sense of the word. He quoted the Roman dramatist Terence: "I am a man and I consider nothing human foreign to me."
When Frank Snowden succeeded George Morton Lightfoot in 1940 as the lone teacher of Latin and Greek at Howard, classical languages and literature were dying in American higher education. The revival of the field at Howard was attributable to Snowden's energetic teaching and his advocacy of the classics. In the 1950s and 1960s he emerged as a national leader in the effort to stem creeping vocationalism in liberal arts colleges, insisting that the general education program required of all freshmen and sophomores include classical literature in English translation, to be followed by serious study of foreign languages and literatures.
