Robert Justice

The event I chose to attend this past semester was the First Black Archeologist talk on February 17th, hosted in the Humanities Center. The speaker was Dr. John Lee from the University of California, Santa Barbara; he noted how he had traditionally studied Achaemenid Persia and Ancient Greece, but this project was a passion project he stumbled across while working on a different topic. This event showcased how the work of many early Black scholars was erased and lost to time, as many white scholars within their respective fields did not view Black scholars as peers or equal. I think that in many of my history classes, this theme extends not only to the African American community here in the United States but other minority groups within former colonial territories where whites are still the majority. Being a history major, I have tried to steer clear of most classical studies as I, as a kid, enjoyed the allure of the Greek Gods and learning about both Roman and Greek Civilizations. But, I could never get into the purely academic side of classics. However, this talk and discussion really interested me again, not only in the classical side of things but also in examining who is researching these topics. This program further revealed the layered complexities in which Black History and Black Scholars have been removed or hidden from the popular American narrative. Therefore, the history of erasure is critical to Dr. Lee’s presentation and Black History in the United States. John Gilbert was systematically erased from American History despite his work as one of the first Black archeologists in the United States.

I had never heard about Professor John Gilbert before Dr. Abrecht advertised this event at the beginning of the semester. So going into the talk, I did not know anything other than that Gilbert was considered the first Black Archeologist in the Classical Field. Yet, in the talk, I learned so much. Gilbert was born and raised in Augusta, Georgia, after the Civil War during Reconstruction. He went to a generously funded public school run by the biracial education committee that allowed children to attend school six months out of the year. Then they worked the other half; for context, most kids were only allowed to go to school for four months of the year. Gilbert attended the Augusta Insitute and continued after the school moved to Atlanta before moving back to Augusta due to financial reasons and attending Paine College/Institute. One fun fact from this period of Gilbert’s life that stood out to me was the savings account he had with Freedman’s Bank. I found it interesting as I learned about this last Spring in African American Women with Dr. Miller and how many formerly enslaved people deposited their funds into this bank only for it to be taken advantage of by whites in the South, who caused the bank to default and African Americans in the South to lose all their savings.

The classics and their study within Black communities within the United States is something of great interest to me. Men such as W.E.B. DuBois got their start in the Classics and taught at various HBCUs in the United States during the late 1800s; Gilbert was no exception. While I do not quite know/understand the origins of Black interest in the topic due to my own lack of knowledge on the subject material, I think I have enough surface knowledge to understand their interest partially. In ancient societies such as the Greek city-states, slavery was not for life or hereditary, and there were societies in which Black and white peoples were free to live among one another. I think then that the interest in studying these societies served as a juxtaposition to American society in the 19th and 20th centuries, where the nation was supposedly founded on these ideals of democracy. Yet, their society was not equal to everyone and differed significantly from it.

Gilbert wanted to study and work firsthand in the many excavations of Athens in the late 19th/early 20th century due to his research and work. However, he ran into a series of setbacks. Financially Paine Intsute had little money to send him, and Gilbert had little money of his own while in school to pay for a trip to Greece. There also was the fact that, at the time, many of the schools in Athens would not take a Black scholar to study and would not give any type of financial aid/scholarship. In connecting to African American History and studies, it showcases the continued repression of Black scholars in the United States and globally. In the modern age, most scholars have to travel abroad at some point during their research, especially if that research is located in another country or region of the world. However, even though men such as Gilbert and DuBois studied the classics, they had little opportunity to travel to where they wanted to study, and then if they did, they had little to no funding.

Classics at the time were dominated by white males, which should come as no surprise since African Americans had been banned from learning to read and write in most places in the South and had limited access elsewhere in the United States. Yet, even though Gilbert was able to overcome those prejudices, he still found himself on the outside, and later his work and contributions to the field were much erased. Dr. John Lee’s work is of the utmost importance and ties in with our class and work, as exemplified in James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers.” Baldwin’s piece is almost 60 years old and still rings true today. He wrote about the need for white teachers to understand the struggles of African Americans and how society has treated them as second-class citizens even though they should have the same liberties and rights as any other American. In his speech, he stated, “If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history.” Baldwin, similar to Gilbert’s work, not only uncovers the truth of their respective fields but also then to publicize it. By recovering and publishing this work, Dr. Lee is doing as Baldwin would’ve liked to see white New York schoolteachers do in the 60s by creating/reframing a narrative that focuses on African Americans being erased from the narrative of American History. Gilbert is going against the traditional American educational system of the time by not maintaining the cycle of African American poverty or appeasing to whites of the South as he is fighting to be seen and recognized as an equal to his academic peers. By doing so, they are bringing awareness to their own research and how difficult it was/is to be taken seriously as a Black scholar and researcher when European or white scholars dominate most fields.

I found further supporting evidence in a secondary article titled “The Skillful Use of Higher Education to Protect White Supremacy,” in which Michael Dennis wrote about how white philanthropists, educators, and businessmen from both conservative and liberal backgrounds worked collaboratively to keep higher education institutions segregated. It is also interesting how other Black scholars, such as Booker T. Washington, through his policy of Accommodationism, bought into this segregated education system if it meant that white money would continue to fund Black education. On page 118, there was a quote from Charles Dabney, President of the University of Tennesse, who wrote, “Nothing is more ridiculous than the progamme of the good religious people from the North who insist upon teaching Latin, Greek, and philosophy to the Negro boys who come to their schools.” From this quote, we can analyze and see why people such as John Gilbert are hardly remembered by history. First, they had to fight an uphill battle in an education system that did not warrant space nor want them there to start with. Secondly, when Gilbert continued to show interest in learning more about the classics, specifically Greece, he directly went against this planned educational restriction by these white men. The work then of Dr. Lee to recover what little remains of his research directly contradicts the narrative and policies these men had placed in place in the Jim Crow South.

I found Dr. Lee’s presentation and research super engaging and interesting because it was a community effort to recover the work. Unfortunately, many of Gilbert’s works were lost in a series of fires at Paine Institute or lost to time. However, the archivist for the current Paine University talked with Professor Lee about working to find many of these lost materials and how many were stored in attics, found at yard sales, or for reasons unknown, spelled Gilbert’s name wrong.

In the end, several of the audience members relayed questions about the work Gilbert worked on and, more specifically, his time in Greece, which was a significant point in the talk. Overall, I think the discussion was interesting in understanding how Black life in the United States looked in academia in the late 1800s/early 1900s and how it has changed for the better. The erasure of people and their stories/voices serves as the basis of African American history. These people have been pushed aside and oppressed for centuries, resulting in their accounts being lost or buried under the curated popular narrative.

Gilbert’s work inspires many young Black scholars in the classics field who can now see all the work that the local community around Augusta and Professor Lee have uncovered. In the recovery process and by further examining Gilbert’s work and how it is similar to many influential Black scholars of his period, it is interesting to see how his name and work have become so hidden and lost, yet others so prominently displayed. This class and his work fit together so seemingly well as they both are trying to uncover some lost narrative or agenda. They are simultaneously lost to time as popular white-washed narratives have overtaken them. Now through their rediscovery, we can tell their stories and understand what happened to these black scholars who, at the time, did so much in their communities but still were lost in time.

Works Cited:

Baldwin, James. “A Talk to Teachers.” October 16, 1963, as “The Negro Child – His Self-Image”; originally published in The Saturday Review, December 21, 1963, reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, Saint Martins 1985. https://richgibson.com/talktoteachers.htm

Dennis, Michael. “The Skillful Use of Higher Education to Protect White Supremacy.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 32 (2001): 115–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/2678797.

Logan, Jim. “The Extraordinary Life of John Wesley Gilbert, the First Black Archaeologist.” University of California, February 19, 2022. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/extraordinary-life-john-wesley-gilbert-first-black-archaeologist.