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Books by Melvin B. Tolson
Rendezvous with
America /
A Gallery of Harlem Portraits /
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia /
Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator
"Harlem Gallery" and Other Poems
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Tolson was more than an
instructor at Wiley: he was a part of Wiley
College. . . . There is no forgetting his
"Voice in the Wilderness." Nor is there any
forgetting his love for dramatics and his
dream of a "little Log Cabin Theatre" on
Wiley's campus. . . . It would be a fitting
tribute to finish this Little Log Cabin
Theatre and dedicate it to him.
Monuments are only for
the great, and after tracing thru [sic] the
records of Wiley's history, we find few men
of greater stature than the radical little
man who brought undying fame to Wiley as a
debate coach, lecturer, author, instructor,
and personality. Thousands went thru [sic]
Wiley during his time: they have not
forgotten. Nor have the countless others who
saw his plays and players, heard his debate
teams, and read his works. Numerous cities
will accept with open arms any group having
sincere loyalty to him. This is a worthy
cause. let's build a monument to it.—Wiley
Reporter (ca. 1947) in Joy Flasch.
Melvin B. Tolson. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.,
1972, p. 34 |
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Now the time has
come for a New Negro Poetry for the
New Negro. The most difficult thing
to do today is tow write modern
poetry. Why? It is the acme of the
intellectual. Longfellow, Whitman,
Milton, Tennsyon, and Poe are no
longer the poets held in high
repute. The standard of poetry has
changed completely. Negroes must
become aware of this. This is the
age of T.S. Eliot who just won the
Nobel Prize in Literature. If you
know Shakespeare from A to Z, it
does not mean you you can read one
line of T.S. Eliot! . . . Imitation
must be in technique only. We have a
rich heritage of folk lore and
history. We are a part of America.
We are a part of the world. Our
native symbols must be lifted into
the universal. Yes, we must study
the techniques of Robert Lowell,
Dylan Thomas, Carlos Williams, Ezra
Pound, Karl Shapiro, W.H. Auden. The
greatest revolution has not been in
science but in poetry. We must study
such magazines as Partisan Review,
the Sewanee Review, Accent,
and the Virginia Quarterly.
We must read such critics as Crowe
Ransom, Allen Tate, Stephen Spender,
George Dillon and Kenneth Burke.—Tolson
quoted in Joy Flasch.
Melvin B. Tolson. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.,
1972, p. 70. |
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The Curator is of
Afroirishjewish ancestry. He is an
octoroon, who is a Negro in New York and
a white man in Mississippi. Like Walter
White, the late executive of the
N.A.A.C.P., and the author of A Man
Called White, the Curator is a
"voluntary" Negro. Hundreds of thousands
of octoroons like him have vanished into
the caucasian race—never
to return. This is a great joke among
Negroes. So Negroes ask the rhetorical
question, "What white man is white?" We
never know the real name of the Curator.
The Curator is both physiologically and
psychologically "The Invisible Man." He,
as well as his darker brothers, think in
Negro. Book One is his
autobiographically. He is a cosmopolite,
a humanist, a connoisseur of the fine
arts, with catholicity of taste and
interest. he knows intimately lowbrows
and middlebrows and highbrows.—Tolson
quoted in Joy Flasch.
Melvin B. Tolson. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.,
1972, p. 100. |
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Melvin B. Tolson
Chronology
| 1900 |
Melvin Beaunorus Tolson
born February 6 in Moberly, Missouri, to the
Reverend Mr. Alonso Tolson and Lera
Hurt |
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Tolson |
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Lived in Moberly, New Franklin, Rolla,
DeSota, and Slater Missouri |
| 1912 |
Lived in Oskaloosa, Iowa. First poem
published in the "Poet's Corner" of the
Oskaloosa newspaper |
| 1913 |
Lived in Mason City, Iowa; Independence
Kansas; Kansas City, Missouri |
| 1915 |
Class poet; director and actor in Greek
Club's Little Theatre; captain of football
team, Lincoln High School, Kansas City, |
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Missouri |
| 1918 |
Graduated from Lincoln High School;
worked in a packinghouse |
| 1919 |
Enrolled in Fisk University, Nashville,
Tennessee. |
| 1920 |
Enrolled in Lincoln University, Oxford,
Pennsylvania; won awards in speech, debate,
dramatics, and Classical literatures; |
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captain of the football team. |
| 1922 |
Married Ruth Southall of Virginia on
January 29. |
| 1923 |
Graduated from Lincoln University with
honors in June. |
| 1924 |
Accepted position as instructor of
English and speech at Wiley College,
Marshall, Texas; continued writing poetry;
wrote |
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novel (unpublished), "Beyond the Zaretto." |
| 1929 |
Coached Wiley College debate teams,
which established ten-year winning streak;
wrote poems, plays, short stories, novels |
| 1930 |
Worked on master's degree in Department
of English and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University; met V.F. |
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Calverton, editor of Modern Quarterly;
wrote "Cabbages and Caviar" column for
Washington Tribune; organized |
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sharecroppers in South Texas |
| 1932 |
Completed 340-page book of poetry, "A
Gallery of Harlem Portraits"; book rejected
by publishers; did not write for several
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years |
| 1935 |
Wiley College debate team coached by
Tolson defeated national champions,
University of Southern California, before
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eleven hundred people |
| 1939 |
Completed novel (unpublished), "The Lion
and the Jackal. Poem "Dark Symphony won
first place in National Poetry |
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Contest sponsored by American Negro
Exposition in Chicago. V.F Calverton, best
friend, died of leukemia |
| 1940 |
Earned a master's degree from Columbia
University. |
| 1941 |
"Dark Symphony" published in Atlantic
Monthly. |
| 1944 |
Rendevous with America, book of
collected poems, published by Dodd, Mead and
Company, Inc. |
| 1945 |
Won Omega Psi Phi Award for Creative
Literature |
| 1947 |
Appointed poet laureate of Liberia by
President V.S. Tubman in January; left Wiley
College to become professor of |
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English and drama at Langston
University, Langston, Oklahoma |
| 1951 |
Received Poetry magazine's bess Hokim
Awrd for long psychological poem, "E. & O.E." |
| 1952 |
Langston University Dust Bowl Players,
directed by Tolson, staged adaptation of
Walter White's The Fire in the Flint
in |
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Oklahoma City for National Association
for the Advancement of colored People
meeting; completed novel (unpublished), |
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"All Aboard"; dramatized George
Schuyler's Black No More. |
| 1953 |
Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
published by Twayne Publishers, Inc. |
| 1954 |
Awarded honorary degree, Doctor of
Letters, by Lincoln University, Oxford,
Pennsylvania; honored at literary tea,
Liberian |
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Embassy, Washington, D.C,; admitted to
Knighthood of the Order of the Star of
Africa, an honored conferred by |
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Ambassador Simpson of Liberia, elected
mayor of Langston (elected three times; 1954
to 1960); became permanent |
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Bread loaf Fellow in poetry and drama. |
| 1956 |
Attended inauguration of President
Tubman in Liberia. |
| 1964 |
Underwent major surgery for abdominal
cancer in April and December |
| 1965 |
Received national and international
attention as result of Karl Shapiro's
prepublication review of
Harlem Gallery: Book I, |
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The Curator, published by Twayne
Publishers, Inc.; presented copy of book to
presidential party in White House; retired
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as professor of English and drama at
Langston University; awarded honorary
degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, Lincoln
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University, Oxford, Pennsylvania;
elected to new York Herald Tribune
book review board; given District of
Columbia |
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Citation and Award for Cultural
Advancement in Fine Arts; became first
appointee to the Avalon Chair in Humanities
at |
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Tuskegee Institute; spoke at Library of
Congress under auspices of Gertrude Clarke
Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund; |
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underwent third operation for cancer in
October. |
| 1966 |
Received annual poetry award of American
Academy of Arts and letters, a grant
($2,500) on May 25; entered St. Paul's |
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Hospital, Dallas, Texas, in June, where
three operations were performed in a
three-month period; died August 29; buried
in |
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Summit View Cemetery, Guthrie, Oklahoma,
September 3. |
Source: Joy Flasch.
Melvin B. Tolson. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.,
1972.
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| Genesis of
Harlem Gallery: Book I, The Curator (1965)
In 1930 I was a student, on a Rockefeller
Fellowship, at Columbia University. I met
there a dreamer from the University of Iowa,
who was trying to put together a Proustian
novel. The thesis for my degree was called
"The Harlem Group of Negro writers." As you
know the Twenties gave birth not only to the
Lost generation but to the Harlem
Renaissance and the New negro. Jazz became a
fad--ancient African art, a novelty of the
intelligentsia. I was in the middle of this
literary revolution before the panic of
1929. One day I showed my young white
friend a sonnet that I had written. It was
titled "Harlem." He read it two or three
times, and then said fretfully, "Melvin,
Harlem is too big for a sonnet." That was
the genesis of the Harlem Gallery. . . .
I know it seems like an
age. The first finished manuscript of the
Harlem gallery was written in free verse.
That was the fashion introduced by the
Imagists. It contained 340 pages. The
Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee
Masters was my model. Browning's psychology
in characterization stimulated me. I had
deserted the great Romantics and Victorians.
Walt Whitman's exuberance was in the marrow
of my bones. I peddled the manuscript in the
New York market. Nobody wanted it. The
publishers and critics said for commercial
reasons. A few of the poems appeared in V.F.
Calverton's Modern Quarterly. Then I
stashed the manuscript in my trunk for
twenty years. At the end of that time I had
read and absorbed the techniques of Eliot,
Pound, Yeats, Baudelaire, Pasternak and, I
believe, all the great Moderns. God only
knows how many "little magazines" I studied,
and how much textual analysis [sic] of the
New Critics. To make a long story short, the
new Harlem Gallery was completed, and now it
is published.—"Melvin
B. Tolson: An Interview" in Herbert Hill,
ed. Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in
the United States. New York: Harper &
Row, 1966, pp. 194-195 |
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Degrees and titles
have fabulous status value. Nobody wants
to be a nobody; everybody wants to be
Somebody! So a title makes the
possessor and the Race Somebody in
the Great White World. Professor,
Doctor, the Honorable, Reverend, Grand
Basileus, President, Grand Polemarch,
Judge, etc. So white folk can't call
these "Boy" and "Uncle." Degrees and
titles in the Negro world have
individual and ethnic survival value.
When a Negro achieves in the Arts or
Sports, his Great I Am runs through the
Race like electricity along a wire. If
he messes up, the same thing occurs. So
Negroes who never go to the Harlem
Gallery get a kick out of the title
The Curator. It's a new title and
shows that the race is going places.—Tolson
quoted in Joy Flasch.
Melvin B. Tolson. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc.,
1972, p. 108-109. |
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Other Views of
Melvin B, Tolson
Melvin Tolson and the 1935
debate team
Tolson was born in
1898 in Moberly, Mo., to a Methodist Episcopal pastor
and his wife. His father served churches in Missouri and
Iowa.
A graduate of
historically black Lincoln (Pa.) University, Tolson was
hired by Wiley College in 1924 to teach English and
speech. He also coached junior varsity football,
directed the theater club and organized the Wiley
Forensic Society.
Tolson was a mentor
and teacher to civil rights activist James Farmer Jr.
and Herman Sweat, an African American who was refused
admission into the University of Texas Law School.
Action by the law school resulted in a Supreme Court
decision that challenged the "separate but equal"
doctrine of racial segregation, a policy established by
the 1896 case of Plessey vs. Ferguson.
He left Wiley in
1947 to teach at historically black Langston (Okla.)
University. That same year, Liberia declared him its
poet laureate. Beginning in 1952, he served two terms as
mayor of all-black Langston. He died in 1966.
Source: A UMNS
Report By Linda Green Oct. 19, 2007
http://www.umc.org
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The Film—On Dec. 25, “The Great Debaters"
will appear in theaters with
Denzel Washington as its director and star, and
Oprah Winfrey as producer.
The film depicts Wiley’s most
glorious chapter: 1935, when the black poet and
professor Melvin B. Tolson coached his debating team to
a national championship. . . . There are hopes to revive
the debate program, and in a movie tie-in, Wal-Mart is
to endow a Melvin B. Tolson Scholarship Fund with
$100,000. . . .
By the time Mr. Tolson arrived in
1923, Wiley had emerged as an elite institution for the
black middle class. The son of a Missouri preacher, Mr.
Tolson had a soul fed by the Harlem Renaissance. He was
both feared and loved, inspiring, as one biographer
wrote, “devotion bordering on adulation in many who knew
him well.” He remained at Wiley 24 years, publishing his
most heralded work of poetry a year before his death in
1966.
Wiley’s 1935 victory over the
University of Southern California (the opponents in
the film are from
Harvard) inspired people long denied dignity in
white society. But the film omits one reality: even
though they beat the reigning champions, the Great
Debaters were not allowed to call themselves victors
because they did not belong to the debate society, which
did not allow blacks until after World War II. . . .
There are plans to establish the campus’s first endowed
chair, named after Mr. Tolson. The poet’s home, next to
campus, now sports a sign in the yard advertising its
place in history.
NYTimes
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Denzel Washington Gives $1M to
Wiley College—December 19, 2007—Denzel Washington is
donating $1 million to Wiley College to re-establish its
debate team. The gift was announced Tuesday by school
officials. Washington was in Marshall last week to screen
"The Great Debaters," the story of Wiley's 1930s debate
team. He stars as educator and poet Melvin Tolson, who
led the all-black college's elite debate squad. During
his appearance, the 52-year-old actor-director said he
would like to see the team get going again.
The Associated Press
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| The Poet
By Melvin B. Tolson
The poet
cheats us with humility
Ignored by
Who's Who among his peers
And Job's
News also, yet this lapidary
Endures the
wormwood of anonymous years:
He shapes
and polishes chaos without a fee,
The bones of
silence fat no pedigree.
His ego is
not vain,
Stuffs not
on caviar of smile and phrase.
He comes of
nobler strain,
Is marrowed
with racier ways:
The beggar
Vanity feeds on the crumbs of praise.
He stands
before the bar of pride,
Gives not a
tinker's dam
For those
who flatter or deride
His epic or
epigram:
The potboy, not the connoisseur, toadies
for a dram.
Peep through
his judas-hole
And see the
dogma of self at work,
The nerve
and verve of soul
That in the
sky-born lurk:
The eagle's
heart abides not in the mole,
The poppy
thrives not at the artic pole.
A freebooter
of lands and seas,
He plunders
the dialects of the marketplace,
Thieves
lexicons of Crown jewel discoveries,
Pillages the
symbols and meccas of the race:
Of thefts
the poet's leaves no trace.
An
Ishmaelite,
He breaks
the icons of the Old and the New,
Devours your
privacy like a parasite,
Parades the
skeletons closeted with God and You:
The poet's lien exempts the Many nor the
Few.
An anchoret,
He feeds on
the raven's bread,
Candies
worlds whose suns have set,
Leads Nature
to the nuptial bed,
Bathes in
pools that never mortals wet:
The poet
unlocks the wilderness with an epithet.
The Champion
of the people versus Kings—
His only
martyrdom is poetry:
A hater of
the hierarchy of things—
Freedom's
need is his necessity.
The poet
flings upon the winds blueprints of Springs:
A bright new
world where he alone
will know work's
menancings!
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Check out former Oklahomans, Drs
Nathan and Julia Hare, in this week's JET magazine
hitting the stands today, January 8th; the one with
Turks and Caicos Islands First Lady Lisa Raye on the
cover and, inside, considerable 411 on the Golden Globe
nominated film, The Great Debater" (Denzel
Washington, Forest Whittaker—produced by Oprah Winfrey).
The Hares, who were both former
students of the film's hero when he taught at Langston
University, are the subjects of a page-length
sidebar, "The Real Great Debater 'Aimed at Broadway and
Hit Hollywood.'" An interesting aside: Nathan later
taught black power advocate Stokely Carmichael and
Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised
Land during a six-year stint on the faculty of Howard
University. Black
Think Tank
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The Hares and Melvin Tolson
Drs. Julia and
Nathan Hare were both students of poet Melvin Tolson,
the teacher portrayed by Denzil Washington in the Great
Debaters. If there one negative criticism of the
Great Debaters, it is that we do not see Melvin
Tolson as the great poet he was. There is little mention
of him as poet. The film opens with him reciting a
Langston Hughes poem, but never do we see him rapping
from his own great body of work. Both Hares were taught
by Tolson at Langston University in Oklahoma. Nathan was
originally an English major under Tolson.
Tolson was a
difficult, detailed, intricate poet whose book
Libretto for Liberia is a poetic classic. Before the
film, he was not well known except in literary circles
and academia. The film should spark interest in his body
of work and the students he mentored such as James
Farmer, Julia and Nathan Hare.—Marvin X
posted 21 December 2007
/ updated 6 February 2008 |
