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Yvettep
Veteran Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 1711
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 02:01 pm: | 
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/obituaries/28snowden.html?_r=3&ref=obituaries& oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Frank M. Snowden Jr., 95, Historian of Blacks in Antiquity, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX
Frank M. Snowden Jr., a historian who was a leading authority on the lives of black people in the ancient world, died on Feb. 18 in Washington. He was 95 and had lived in Washington for many years.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, Frank M. Snowden III, said.
At his death, Dr. Snowden was distinguished professor of history emeritus at Howard University, where he had taught for half a century. He was also a former United States cultural attaché in Rome, the first African-American to hold the post there.
In his work, Dr. Snowden documented Greek and Roman encounters with black Africans over many centuries, contending that racial prejudice, at least as it is defined today, was largely unknown in antiquity. His books include “Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience” (Harvard University, 1970) and “Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks” (Harvard University, 1983).
Dr. Snowden’s scholarship took in a 3,000-year period, from the middle of the third millennium B.C. to the sixth century A.D. Trained as a classicist, he mined Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Hebrew and early Christian texts and also visited museums around the world to examine the depictions of blacks in ancient art.
Though Dr. Snowden was not the first to study blacks in antiquity, his work helped ensure that the subject was more than a scholarly curiosity, Maghan Keita, a professor of history at Villanova University and the author of “Race and the Writing of History” (Oxford University, 2000), said yesterday in a telephone interview.
“He gave the study its body, its heft, its weight,” Dr. Keita said. “And he made that study a body of work that is almost unassailable by people who want to believe that there is no African presence in the classical world.”
Whites in the ancient world rarely equated blackness with subordination, Dr. Snowden argued, because the black people they encountered were rarely slaves. (Most slaves in the Roman Empire, for instance, were white.) Instead, they met blacks who were warriors, statesmen and mercenaries.
While some critics accused Dr. Snowden of idealizing the past, he maintained throughout his career that racial bias was a relatively modern phenomenon.
“Nothing comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern times existed in the ancient world,” Dr. Snowden wrote in “Before Color Prejudice.” He added: “The ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin color was not a sign of inferiority; Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an obstacle to integration.”
Frank Martin Snowden Jr. was born in rural York County, Va., on July 17, 1911; his father, Frank M. Sr., was an Army colonel. The family moved to Boston when Frank Jr. was a child, and he attended the Boston Latin School, where he was first captivated by the classics. He earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard in 1932, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in the field, also from Harvard, in 1933 and 1944.
After teaching at Virginia State and Spelman Colleges, Dr. Snowden joined the Howard faculty in 1940, serving over the years as chairman of the classics department and dean of the college of liberal arts. In the 1950s, he lectured in Europe, Africa and elsewhere for the State Department; from 1954 to 1956, he was the cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Rome.
Dr. Snowden’s wife, the former Elaine Hill, whom he married in 1935, died in 2005. Besides his son, Frank M. III, a professor of 20th-century Italian history at Yale, Dr. Snowden is survived by a daughter, Jane Lepscky, a linguist, of Washington; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
His other work includes “The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire” (Morrow, 1976), written with several co-authors. In 2003, President Bush awarded Dr. Snowden the National Humanities Medal.
In a literal sense, Dr. Keita of Villanova said, Dr. Snowden’s scholarship helped change the complexion of antiquity.
“It’s probably one of the most important bodies of work out there in terms of getting people to understand that people of African descent inhabited the entire globe at all periods of historical time,” Dr. Keita said. “And not only that they inhabited the globe, but that they’ve had a profound impact on the way in which the world and its history has been shaped.”
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Mzuri
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Mzuri
Post Number: 3692
Registered: 01-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 02:34 pm: |
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Rest In Peace Dr. Snowden  |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7545
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 03:14 pm: |
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I wish this distinguished scholar had given a theory or a history of why black Africans and their diaspora came to be so universally rejected by their fellow human beings?? What was the origin of skin color becoming a world-wide demarcation of status. |
Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 1920
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 06:24 pm: |
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He was a brilliant man who lived a long and academically fruitful life. I considered him, Lerone Bennett and John Hope Franklin to be the deans of living black American historians. I'm sorry to hear of his death.
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Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 3804
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 03:47 pm: |
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I wish this distinguished scholar had given a theory or a history of why black Africans and their diaspora came to be so universally rejected by their fellow human beings?? What was the origin of skin color becoming a world-wide demarcation of status.
(she didn't post this.
Somebody tell me Cynique didn't post this.
Here you is, old enough to have been a waitress at the Last Supper and you don't know?
You should be tellin' HIM
sh********t! |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 3805
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 03:48 pm: |
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I had a dream about you last night, Cynique...... |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7558
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 03:54 pm: |
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Who cares whether your had a dream about me, chrishayden? Here's your chance to prove you are as smart as you think you are. Answer the question I wondered about. |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 3807
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 05:12 pm: |
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Probably because they post dumb stuff on internet discussion group threads.
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Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 3808
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 05:13 pm: |
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Cynique:
Don't you want to hear about....my dream? |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7561
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 06:12 pm: |
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No. |
Libralind2
Veteran Poster
Username: Libralind2
Post Number: 687
Registered: 09-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 07:31 pm: |
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" WELL DEMMIT..I DO..."
LiLi |
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