St. Clair Drake's 2 volume essay in history and anthropology, Black Folk Here and There, inspired by a similarly titled book by W.E.B. DuBois, is an exploration of the presence of "Negro" or "Black" people throughout recorded history, ending with the rise of anti-black prejudice. In the two-volumed text, he explores the role and presence of "Black" people in ancient Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, early Christianity, and the Islamic world, searching for evidence of anti-black bias or racist views in each of these periods in world history. The founder of Stanford's African-American Studies department, and well-known for his sociological work in Black Metropolis, an analysis of Chicago's African-American population in the 1940s, Drake is well-suited to vindicate the legacy of "Black" Africans prior to the Atlantic slave trade, spending most of the first volume providing evidence of "Negro" Egyptian dynasts and contributions to the development of Egyptian civilization through documentary, artistic, and other evidence. Thus, Drake's first volume, concluding with the rise of Roman-dominated Egypt, rightfully challenges the approach of most Egyptologists and historians who render all "Negroes" into slaves and laborers for "whites" in the ancient Nile Valley and Mediterranean. However, unlike extreme Afrocentrists, Drake avoids making irrational claims and attempts to "blacken" everybody in ancient Egypt or the Near East. A weakness of his study also lies in the evidence from statuary and art, since color symbolism and ancient Egyptian art's tendency to represent the human form unrealistically makes it difficult to say or claim this or that figure, pharaoh, or god is "black" or "white," but in some cases it is uncontroversial (I am sure many readers would take qualm with his claims for "Black" Amarna pharaohs, best represented by Akhenaten) or very likely that the Early Dynastic, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, Napatan, Meroitic, and Late Dynastic art of the Nile Valley depicts people with the somatic norm of "Black Africans." Moreover, Drake uncovers no evidence of racial bias against "Nubians" or Kushites during periods of Egyptian imperialism in the Upper Nile, nor even when, under Hellenic and Roman domination, when southerners, Egyptians, and Greco-Romans alike worshipped Isis at Philae, for instance.
The second volume of Drake's major publication covers ancient Jewish perceptions of Blackness, in the Old Testament and Talmud, as well as Early Christian, Islamic, and, ending with Iberia and the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries, the signs for anti-black racism. He does not uncover signs of Jewish prejudice until the Talmud, which he attributes to Jews who, during the Babylonian Captivity, encountered enslaved East Africans and then added theories of the "curse of Ham" and black inferiority into their commentaries on the Torah. It is an interesting theory, but Drake does not provide evidence for trade linking Mesopotamia in this period with the East African coast, although it would help explain the sudden anti-black views of some Jewish religious leaders when, in the past, Moses was described as marrying a black woman, the kingdom of Judah was allied with the Egyptian-Kushite empire under Taharka against the Assyrian empire. He also discusses the color symbolism of early Christianity, in which blackness of skin was equated with sin and Christian conversion as a way of "washing the Ethiopian white," something he associates with Manichean dualism of black/white color symbolism from ancient Persia, where black/darkness was seen as evil and white/lightness as good. Although his conclusions, somewhat similar to Snowden's work on the image of the 'black' in the Greco-Roman and early Christian Mediterranean are interesting, they're far from the highlight of the of book, which is strongest in its treatment of Nile Valley societies and race. He also challenges some of the then-dominant theories of racism and the origins of it, stating that color prejudice and anti-black views were not endemic in the ancient Nile Valley nor a part of the Antiquity, nor an innate aversion to blackness in human skin.
His work also stands as a powerful rebuttal of Malvern Wan Wyk Smith's interesting but highly flawed monograph, The First Ethiopians: The Image of Africa and Africans in the Early Mediterranean World, claiming Ancient Egypt as the source for Western anti-black prejudice with very little evidence and a resurrection of outdated African racial types, such as Khoisanoid, to distinguish early Nile Valley populations from "Negroids." Furthermore, he relies on imagery of conquered Kushites and other nehesy, or southerners, in ancient Egyptian iconography as evidence for an aversion or disdain for "Negroid" Black features without any documentary evidence disparaging their facial features or showing signs of race or color prejudice. Moreover, his sources that actually do indicate denigration of dark-skinned people, come thousands of years later, under Hellenic, Roman and Christian periods. But I digress, Drake's tome, though published in the 1980s, does a much better job at describing 'race relations' in this age before race, avoiding the extreme Afrocentrism of other authors while ensuring all Nile Valley societies' ties to "Black Africa."
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