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It highlights how African American intellectual leaders including Fanny Jackson Coppin, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Wesley Gilbert, and William Sanders Scarborough engaged with Xenophon’s works.

Overall, Lee’s story charted the course of Black education in America during the late nineteenth century, when African Americans’ studying of Greek was a deeply political act. In reading Xenophon, Lee argued, Black Americans were at once declaring their personhood, disproving racist beliefs regarding their intelligence, and asserting their belonging in a society where a classical education carried great prestige.

Lee concluded, it is important to recognize “Xenophon’s underappreciated but crucial role.”