William Leo Hansberry

For instance, in 2020 a trans-continental group of emerging black scholars founded the Hansberry Society “dedicated to making the study of ancient Nile Valley and Northeast African cultures more inclusive to scholars of African descent.” Other scholars inspired by Hansberry are also challenging the perpetuation of racist myths within the Classics and working to eliminate artificial disciplinary siloes  that discourage and even preclude the integrated study of ancient Africa, the Classics, Egyptology, and Nubiology.  Hansberry is widely credited with laying the foundation for transcending biases within and boundaries between these fields. 

However, despite growing awareness within the academy and occasional allusions to his influence on the work of Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright and his niece (author of A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs and other works), William Leo Hansberry remains largely obscure in academic literature and unknown to the general public. To-date, the most comprehensive and detailed analyses of Hansberry’s intellectual legacy are historian Joseph Harris’s two-volume William Leo Hansberry African History Notebook, which was first published by the now defunct Howard University Press in the 1970s, and Kwame Wes Alford’s dissertation, A Prophet Without Honor, William Leo Hansberry completed in 1998. 

Hansberry’s life’s work spanned forty years of global upheavals, which also encompassed a major transition for the United States in the world during the first half of the twentieth century: the crisis of European empire leading up to and after World War I; the rise of cultural anthropology and temporary retreat of scientific racism; the Great Depression and Popular Front against Fascism; and the convergence of decolonization in the so-called Third World with the black struggle for human and citizenship rights in the United States and the beginning of the United States’ Cold War rise to global super-power status.  

Shortly after completing his undergraduate studies at Harvard in 1921, Hansberry wrote James Weldon Johnson, then head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to propose that the NAACP serve as the sponsor of a series of courses for black school teachers across the South. Hansberry was on a mission: to expose black school children to an alternative, non- racist origin story for “civilization” that centers Africa. At Harvard he had challenged the biases of professors including George Reisner, the acclaimed Egyptologist, who maintained that the Nubians could not possibly have built great kingdoms including the Egyptian pyramids. In the twenty first century Hansberry’s assertions about the civilizational achievements of ancient Kush, now known as Nubia, are being vindicated.   

In 1923, not long after he began teaching at Howard University, Hansberry wrote a “Special Article” extolling the university’s singular role in providing advanced academic training for people of African descent from all over the world, including the African continent. He maintained that “scientific” racism had fallen into disrepute and that burgeoning interest in the new social sciences and archeology and anthropology presented Howard with a “supreme opportunity” to take the lead in developing an interdisciplinary program of African Studies.