Melvin B. Tolson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Melvin Beaunorus Tolson (February 6, 1898–August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several poetic histories. He was a contemporary of the Harlem Renaissance and, although he was not a participant in it, his work reflects its influences. Liberia declared Melvin B. Tolson as its poet laureate in 1947.

1 Life
2 Literary works
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Life

He was born in Moberly, Missouri. He was the son of a Methodist minister and an Afro-Creek mother. His family moved between various churches in the Missouri and Iowa area until finally settling in the Kansas City area. He graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919, and enrolled in Fisk University that same year. He transferred to Lincoln University that same year for financial reasons. He graduated with honors in 1924, and in the same year he moved to Marshall, Texas to teach Speech and English at Wiley College. While at Wiley, Tolson built up an award-winning debate team which, in 1935, beat Harvard in the national championships. Denzel Washington is directing a film called The Great Debaters based on this event, to be released in 2008 [1].

He mentored students such as James L. Farmer, Jr. and Heman Sweatt at Wiley. He encouraged his students not only to be well-rounded people but to also to stand up for their rights, a controversial position in the U.S. South of the early and mid-20th century.

Tolson took a leave of absence to earn a Master's degree from Columbia University in 1930-31, which he didn't complete until 1940. Tolson began teaching at Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma in 1947; that year, Liberia declared him as its poet laureate. Tolson entered local politics and served four terms as Mayor of Langston from 1954 to 1960. One of his students at Langston University was Nathan Hare, the black studies pioneer, who later was founding publisher of The Black Scholar. Tolson died after cancer surgery in Dallas, Texas, on August 29, 1966. He is buried in Langston.

[edit] Literary works

From 1930 on Tolson began writing poetry, and in 1941 Dark Symphony, often considered his greatest work, was published in Atlantic Monthly. Dark Symphony compares and contrasts African-American and European-American history. In 1944 Tolson published his first poetry collection, Rendezvous with America, which includes Dark Symphony. The Washington Tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, Cabbage and Caviar after he left his teaching position at Wiley in the late 1940s.

His Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), another major work, is in the form of an epic poem.

In 1965 Tolson's final work to be published in his life time, the long poem Harlem Gallery, was published. The poem consists of several sections, each beginning with a letter of the Greek alphabet. The poem concentrates on African American life and is a drastic departure from his first works. The poems he wrote in New York were published posthumously in 1979 as A Gallery of Harlem Portraits. A Gallery of Harlem Portraits is a mixture of various styles as well as free verse. The racially diverse and culturally rich community presented in A Gallery of Harlem Portraits may be based on or intended to be Marshall, Texas.