Christopher Parmenter (New York University)
Martin Bernal (1937-2013) concluded the first of his three-volume Black Athena with a gratuitous personal attack on the African American classicist Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (1911-2007). “There is no doubt,” he wrote, “that the time for the ‘old scrappers’ is past and that most Blacks will not be able to accept the conformity to white scholarship of men and women like Professor Snowden” (1987: 434-35). Bernal was hardly the first person to accuse Snowden (a widely-respected figure who had recently been elected president of the American Philological Association) of accommodationism. Snowden had been a target of the Black student left in the 1960s, who accused him of complicity with the Vietnam draft while serving as an administrator at Howard University (Parmenter 2021: 6). During his State Department service in the 1950s, Snowden had come under attack by Italian and Greek communists for peddling a false narrative about the Eisenhower administration’s progress on desegregation (Snowden and White 1956: 105-6). It should not have been a surprise that Snowden’s response to Bernal was bitter: Snowden refused to appear on stage with Bernal at an APA panel on Black Athena the following year (Adler 2016: 115-16), and he consented to be a public face of right-wing classicists’ various attempts to smear Bernal (Keita 1993). But despite the impolitic nature of Bernal’s attack, it was not without substance. Snowden was known to respond hyperbolically to even mild critiques of his work by junior scholars, particularly junior scholars of color (see Snowden’s 1990 review of Thompson 1989). Right or wrong, Bernal brought grumbles about Snowden out into the open.
This paper situates the Bernal/Snowden dispute in the longer history of what I call the ‘racial counternarrative’ about the role of Black people in Greco-Roman antiquity. In a series of publications between 1947-2001, Snowden had vigorously argued that Greeks and Romans “counted black people in” (1970: 218) as equal members of their societies. Greece and Rome could thus serve as models for a post-segregation America. This narrative was neither Snowden nor Bernal’s invention: it had been circulated at least since the 1820s, when it was deployed by Black abolitionists such as David Walker (1796-1830) to counter the white supremacist visions of Greece and Rome that had been emanating out of the Old South (Malamud 2016: 63-69). What Bernal and Snowden fundamentally disagreed over were the political consequences of this narrative. To Snowden, Black people in antiquity were members of something like a Black bourgeoisie, who were respected and treated equitably by their white peers. To Bernal, Blackness was fundamentally transgressive—a position made difficult by his generally flippant attitude towards race in America (Levine 1998: 352, McCoskey 2012: 177-81, 2018). I argue that the Bernal/Snowden dispute was encoded in the politics of the early Cold War era, with Snowden taking the side of establishment, professional-class conservatism and Bernal internationalist leftism.