Content area
Full Text
It would be very difficult to find a more formidable and respected African American scholar who has had so little visibility among African American intellectuals as Nathan Alexander Scott, Jr. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 24, 1925, Scott finished his B.A. at the University of Michigan in 1944, his B.D. at Union Theological Seminary in 1946, and his Ph.D at Columbia University in 1949. In 1946 he was hired as dean of the chapel at Virginia Union University. From 1948 to 1955 he taught in the humanities program at Howard University in Washington, D.C. An ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, Scott taught, from l955 to 1976, at the University of Chicago, where in 1972 he became the Shailer Mathews Professor of Theology and Literature. In 1976 he and his wife, Charlotte Hanley Scott, a professor of business, were simultaneously hired among the first black tenured professors at the University of Virginia. At Virginia, Nathan Scott was William R. Kenan Professor of Religious Studies and, in 1980, became Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies. He also held a distinguished chair as Commonwealth Professor in the Department of English. In 1990, he retired from his teaching duties and became Professor Emeritus of the University of Virginia.
The basis of Nathan Scott's preeminence...