UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE LANGSTON UNIVERSITY: A HISTORY OF TRANSFORMATIVE RHETORICS AT OKLAHOMA’S ONLY HBCU, 1960-1970 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY CINDY FAYE MCNULTRY ROSS Norman, Oklahoma 2021 LANGSTON UNIVERSITY: A HISTORY OF TRANSFORMATIVE RHETORICS AT OKLAHOMA’S ONLY HBCU, 1960-1970 A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY THE COMMITTEE CONSISTING OF Dr. Susan Kates, Chair Dr. Catherine John, Co-Chair Dr. William Kurlinkus Dr. Adam Banks Dr. Rilla Askew Dr. Kirsten Edwards © Copyright by CINDY FAYE MCNULTRY ROSS 2021 All Rights Reserved. Dedicated to Lee Allen Ross (9/17/65 – 9/28/15) for his unselfish support over the years, and for helping me realize the possibility of achieving my dream. You always inspired me to reach higher, and I will always love you. Rest in Heaven! iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I give honor to God, whom I acknowledge as my Lord and savior. Over the years, He kept me surrounded by supportive family and caring people, without whom, this accomplishment would not be possible. Personally, I want to thank Dr. Adam J. Banks who began this journey with me at Syracuse University back in 2004. His continued support and mentoring have sustained me academically over the years. Thank you for being there through the difficult periods; I appreciate you for always being available to listen and guide. I could not have found my way in these “academic streets” without you! I hope to one day do the same for some student, somewhere, who might need me. Special love and thanks to Dr. Catherine John who embraced me as a friend, mentored me, and played a significant role in my return to the University of Oklahoma to complete my degree after the long illness and devastating loss of my life partner. Her labor of love will never be forgotten. Also significant, I want to thank Dr. Susan Kates, my committee chair, who always expressed enthusiasm and support for my project. Her encouragement kept me pushing. Additionally, to my remaining committee members— Drs. William Kurlinkus, Kirsten Edwards, and Rilla Askew, thank you for reading my drafts and offering helpful feedback. Lastly, but certainly not least, I want to thank Richard L. Johnson for listening and allowing me to bounce ideas off him. He helped me think through and refine my thoughts on the Black experience in America—that hood stuff, that special literacy, that it takes being a part of a culture and to understand. And to Sydney Duncan, who helped me dream the reality, thank you. God brought us together at the right time. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . .. v TABLE OFCONTENTS . vi ABSTRACT . vii INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER 1. Liberating Pedagogies: Letting Past Histories Inform the Future . .16 CHAPTER 2. Making History and Changing Lives: Langston University, the Beginnings, and Hale’s Legacy, 1960-1970 . 83 CHAPTER 3. Help Me Breathe! Developing Good Enough Game . 106 CHAPTER 4. The Development and Rhetoric of Communitas at Langston . .134 AFTERWORD . .170 NOTES . 179 WORKS CITED . .180 vi ABSTRACT This project presents a history of Langston University, Oklahoma’s only historically Black college. Langston has successfully served marginalized groups within and without the territory for over 100 years. The school began as a Land Grant College in 1897. I investigate rhetorical education at Langston University from 1960-1970 to fill a critical gap in past histories of the field of composition and rhetoric that have traditionally omitted the Black experience. Oklahoma provides a unique site for critical inquiry and conversations about race and culture because of the state’s history of Black towns and the Tulsa genocide. To educate Black students on the cusps of integration, Langston offered students a culturally relevant liberatory education effectively bridging their home and school lives to better prepare them for integration. The historical racial dynamics in the state, and Black Oklahomans push for independence to govern themselves, and having only one central HBCU to address the needs of the Black population makes Oklahoma unique. The study draws heavily from theoretical interdisciplinary approaches to teaching literacy learning. President William Henri Hale led Langston through the civil rights and Black liberation eras. Because of the absence of written records and documentation, the research presented relies heavily on personal interviews with students and teachers who attended and taught at Langston during the period of inquiry. A close examination of pedagogies shows that students at Langston during the 60s received an activist education—one that focuses on reading, writing, and civic duties—through racialized pedagogies designed to liberate them. Furthermore, a Black liberatory education at Langston stretched far beyond skills based rhetorical approaches to teaching writing. vii Introduction When I first moved to Oklahoma in the spring of 2008, admittedly, I had no knowledge of its history of all Black towns or of its legacy of racial discrimination. The year also carries broad symbolic importance in America because we elected our first Black president, Barack Obama, that November. I wasn’t thinking too much about the election during my job search or my being an African American female. I was more concerned with employment near the Fort Sill Army Base, located in Lawton, Oklahoma. I was excited to take a position teaching English at Western Oklahoma State College (WOSC) in Altus, about 60 miles west of the base. At the time, I also had no idea one of the worst race massacres in history, the Tulsa Riot of 1921, took place only a 3.5 hour drive north of Altus and Cache, Oklahoma where I took a job the next year teaching high school. I also had no idea that Langston University, Oklahoma’s only historically Black college and a historical center for the sustainment of Oklahoma’s Black intellectual base, sat just 140 miles northeast of Cache. I found my way to this project as I meditated geographically on my students, Oklahoma’s legacy of all Black towns, and literacy learning in America and what that means for different cultural groups. How do we promote anti-racist teaching that leads to community building? Reflecting on patterns of behavior such as the #BlackLivesMatter and other social justice movements as literate acts led me to attempt to reconcile my own personal experiences and pedagogies as a Black woman in education and academe in the state; it became clear to me that Langston was a safe haven for Black students in the past and now. In the lineage of Jaqueline Royster (2000), Deborah Brandt (2001), and the New London Group (Cope and Kalantzis 2000), I posit literacy learning as a socio- 1 cognitive function. I learned this as I settled into the state as first a teacher and second a PhD student at the University of Oklahoma. As a teacher, I encountered a reckless disregard for others that comes not so much from racism but from an unawareness of how culture and place define and control space. As a graduate student in Oklahoma, dealing with peers, I came to realize that many of my white peers possessed an almost total unawareness of the self and how they control and alter space. I believe this attitude to be influenced by individuality and worldviews that make whiteness invisible (Ratcliffe 4). However, to problem solve effectively and promote inclusive pedagogies one must be aware of how s/he alters space. I often felt isolated and ignored by both teachers and students. Whether my feelings reflect reality or not, I experienced those feelings, and those feelings were real. And even more enigmatic to me is that I sat in graduate seminars and no one seemed to acknowledge that, as the only Black student in the class, I might be experiencing some cultural discomfort. The elephant in the room—pedagogical impasses that give little to no attention to the dynamics of race, culture, group work, and inclusivity—remained hidden in plain sight as everyone discussed how to deal with the elephant. From experience working with young Oklahomans—ages 15-28—I found that Oklahoma rednecks1 proudly wear their regalia showing their affiliation with historically racist groups and symbols of white pride, such as the Confederacy and Nazi Germany; they also wear their boots, which signifies their red dirt pride navigating the plains, the frontier, agriculture, farming, raising cattle, wheat, or whatever the crop. Oklahomans value hard work. Nearly all the white student population participated in Ag and 4-H. I found that my students spent their time cow tipping, building bonfires at night, catching 2 rat snakes for sport, and mud dogging—what the students referred to in their hallway chatter as “redneck” activities. In fact, my students used the word redneck the way a younger Black population would use the word “nigga.” Both take a word with general negative connotation and appropriate and elevate the word rhetorically to a position of cultural pride. In hallway chatter and interaction among students, I recognized a western cultural aesthetic—a way of doing and seeing—that had been passed down through the generations. Such an aesthetic creates a rhetoric of exclusivity read through clothing, activities, and fraternization for those outside the culture. While I met some of the kindest people that first year at Cache High School whom I can and will describe as beautiful human beings, racism reared its ugly head. I was menaced daily by a few who grouped together and displayed confederate regalia tattooed on their arms and T-shirts with the confederate flag juxtaposed with slogans that read “If you’re offended, maybe you’re the racist”; I had swastikas drawn on fists atop desks, pointed directly at me, creating quite the hostile environment.