Frank Snowden Jr.

Frank Martin Snowden Jr. was born in Virginia in 1911. He dedicated his life to the study of antiquity. He focused primarily on the presence and condition of the African population within two great civilizations, the Greek and the Roman. 

After moving with his family to Boston, Snowden attended the Boston Latin School where he became fascinated by the classical world. His doctoral dissertation, De Servis Libertisque Pompeianis, was on the institution of slavery and the ideals of freedom and equality in the ancient city of Pompeii and laid the foundation for all his further research.

In 1938, after winning the Rosenwald Fellowship, Snowden made his first trip to Italy. His short stay in Rome gave him the opportunity to examine the Italian mass media. He mainly focused on how they presented the social situation in 1930s America and especially on how they portrayed the condition of African American people at the time. He wrote about this experience in "Race Propaganda in Italy" (1940). In his paper Snowden examined the rise of attitudes of intolerance and racism toward coloured people within various news articles and volumes written and published in Italy in 1938, the period immediately preceding the introduction of the racial laws. Among the publications Snowden consulted there were such daily newspapers and magazines as La Difesa della Razza, Il Tevere, Il Giornalissimo, as well as Vito Beltrani's book S. O. S. Dal Paese Di Tutte Le Libertà (Gli Stati Uniti e il Pericolo Rosso). 

In 1949 Snowden returned to Italy as a Fulbright Scholar where he remained until 1950. During his stay, Snowden sought to understand and analyse Italy's position on the racial segregation in the US. Assisted by the United States Information Service in Italy, he examined examples drawn from the media coverage on the issue. He analysed various articles appearing in newspapers such as Il Quotidiano, La Voce Repubblicana, Il Momento, Il Paese and Noi Donne. The outcomes of his research were briefly summarized in "The Italian Press Views America's Attitude Toward Civil Rights and the Negro" (1952). In his paper, Snowden pointed out that the Italian press of the age sought to shed light on the harsh reality of African Americans in the decade following the end of World War II, highlighting not only the interplaying relational dynamics within American society in the 1940s, but also the invaluable contribution of many African American figures to the U.S. scientific and cultural community of the time.

In 1954 Snowden was appointed cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rome. He was the first diplomat of African American descent to hold the position. The position allowed Snowden to attend several European and international meetings and conferences as well as to familiarize himself with the Italian and foreign media. In "A European View of American Education" (1959), Snowden recalled the Italian conference from which emerged a comparison between the American and Italian educational systems, a meeting organized for the purpose of reassessing and improving the Italian system.

In 1958, Snowden received the Gold Medal in recognition of his significant contribution to Italian cultural education. In 1970, after decades of research, Snowden published Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience, a volume that would soon become his most notable work, winning in 1973 the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the American Philological Association. In his other volumes as well as in the papers he published from 1947 onward, Snowden argued that the racial bias was a relatively modern phenomenon, stressing that discrimination based on skin color and racial segregation were unknown concepts to Roman civilization. He also claimed that, with the exception of the racism characteristic of the fascist period which was noted with a certain frequency in the press as well as in the writings of some scholars of that period, the history of Rome from antiquity to modern times never saw biological differences between populations as an obstacle to integration.

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