In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

14 1 Integrating Traditions at a Private Black College The banquet of my Wiley years was the tutelage of Tolson. A scholar without credentials . . . a poet and dramatist who had not yet published, Tolson taught English, but that was the least of the things he taught. He stretched the minds of all whose minds would be stretched.—James Farmer He excluded nothing, nobody, / Except the repeatedly vain, repeatedly foolish, / And told them, excluding them, how to know better.—Thomas Whitbread The University of Texas at Austin in the early 1940s was no place for a liberal academic. For several years, the school’s board of regents, fearing communism and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in seemingly equal measure, waged a bitter campaign against academic freedom and left-leaning faculty; they attempted to abolish tenure and cut the university’s budget, eliminated research funds for the social sciences, fired untenured economics instructors who had publicly protested in support of federal labor laws, and, after unsuccessfully attempting to find and fire the English professor who had placed a book from John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy on a sophomore-class reading list, banned the book from the university. In 1944, when President Homer Rainey protested these and other actions, he himself was fired, an act that caused thousands of students to march on the capitol and helped earn the university a seven-year censure by the American Association of University Professors (A. Cox). While the controversy in Austin attracted national attention, at Wiley College, a small, black liberal arts school in Marshall, Texas, in the state’s Integrating Traditions 15 rural northeastern corner, openly liberal professors flourished: theologian James Leonard Farmer, who preached the social gospel; sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox, who argued that race was a social construct and a function of capitalist exploitation; and poet, activist, and self-professed socialist Melvin Beaunoris Tolson, who blended conservative language instruction with race pride and radical politics. That two schools in the same state and era could have such different campus environments suggests the importance of examining diverse local histories in order to build a better understanding of the development of rhetorical instruction in American colleges. UT and Wiley were each set up for different purposes to serve different constituencies. As a state institution, UT was checked by a legislature and governing body recognizing the need for higher education but also highly suspicious of it. Wiley, in contrast, was founded by the Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, with the express goal of creating black leaders. As a private black liberal arts college, Wiley represents an important site of inquiry for historians of rhetoric and composition. Although a number of scholars, such as Jacqueline Bacon, Shirley Wilson Logan, Elizabeth McHenry, and Jacqueline Jones Royster, have called our attention to rich African American rhetorical practices outside of formal educational settings, the wide-ranging diversity of practices within diverse institutional settings of higher learning has only just begun to be explored.1 We need curricular histories as rich as those community histories to fully trace the development and impact of African American rhetorical traditions. Moreover, an examination of historically black colleges and universities, such as Wiley, reveals a fascinating counterstory to received rhetoric and composition histories. At many private black liberal arts colleges, the classical liberal arts tradition persisted well into the 1920s, with Latin and Greek retained as requirements long after such courses had become electives at elite white schools. Oratory, moved to the periphery of the curriculum elsewhere,2 continued to play an important role; speechwriting was frequently incorporated into freshman composition courses, and debate and drama were enormously popular campus activities. The role of what is now called current-traditional rhetoric was also complicated by both the unique mission of private black colleges and the constituencies they served. These schools were frequently hierarchical and authoritarian, with what might be regarded as a foundationalist grounding in Christian ethics and social mores. Yet they were also set up to serve explicitly civic purposes, building on long-standing tropes in African American political discourse that emphasized the role of education and literacy 16 Integrating Traditions in promoting citizenship and community strength. Strict classroom and campus discipline and prescriptivist language instruction, elsewhere criticized for their association with positivist epistemologies and homogenizing or even deracializing effects, in private black colleges served curricular and community ends. In this chapter, I examine the pedagogical practices of perhaps Wiley’s most famous professor, Melvin Tolson, through the lens of...

Share