He became an apprentice shoemaker and served as the secretary of a prominent black association at an early age due to his level of education.

[1][2] After the end of the American Civil War, he was able to complete his education at Lewis High School in Macon before attending Atlanta University in 1869 for two years before enrolling at Oberlin College.

[3][1][2] After graduating from college, Scarborough returned as a teacher in classical languages to Lewis High School, where he met his future wife Sarah Bierce, who was the principal.

However, in 1892, Scarborough gave a lecture on Plato at the University of Virginia in a room hung with pictures of Jefferson Davis and other confederate leaders and where no other African Americans were allowed except as servants.

However, Michele Ronnick, professor in the Classics Department of Wayne State University, found a copy of the manuscript in the archives of the Ohio Historical Society.

Ronnick edited The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey From Slavery to Scholarship, which was published in 2005 by Wayne State University Press with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates.

[1][2] He was a participant in the March 5, 1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of Frederick Douglass which founded the American Negro Academy led by Alexander Crummell.

[5] Scarborough played an active role in the early years of this first major African American learned society, which refuted racist scholarship, promoted black claims to individual, social, and political equality, and studied the history and sociology of African American life.