The History of the Department of English at Pitt, compiled and researched by our former Crow Chair in Composition and Department Chair, Dave Bartholomae, includes research on Black students who had connections with or degrees from Pitt English from the 1900s to 1960s and/or students who were associated with HBCUs, Black music and the Black press. See below for a selection of these students, excerpted from the site, and visit the links below for pictures and more context.
--Annette Vee, Feb 2022
Robert L. Vann (1879-1940) entered the Western University of Pennsylvania as a scholarship student in 1903, graduating in 1906. He was a member of the Philomathean Society and served as editor of the student magazine, the Courant. He received 2nd prize in the Senior Oratorical Contest for a speech, “The Heavy Belgian Hand: Wrath that Makes for Praise,” on Belgian rule in the Congo. (Thomas Blaisdell was one of the judges.) Vann graduated from the WUP Law School in 1909 and opened a law practice, serving as one of only five African American lawyers in Pittsburgh. In 1910, he became editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, a position he held until his death in 1940. Under his leadership, the Pittsburgh Courier became one of the most influential and most widely read black newspapers in the United States.
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1900s/1900s-students
Riley Salathian Lethwick won a Freshman Literature Prize in 1908 and graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry in 1911. In 1910, he was the Secretary of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Federation of Musicians, and he was living on Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill district. In 1926 he was in Chicago working in the music business as a composer and lyricist with Okeh Records. One of his compositions, “The Mail Train Blues,” was recorded by Sippie Wallace and Louis Armstrong.
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1900s/1900s-students
Lewis Henry Fenderson (PhD 1948; diss: “Development of the Negro Press, 1827-1948”). Fenderson, who also received his BA and MA at Pitt, came to the PhD program after working as a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier. In 1949, Fenderson joined the faculty at Howard University, where he helped to establish Howard’s program in Journalism. Fenderson taught at Howard for 34 years. He had success as a poet, song writer, and playwright, winning the James Weldon Johnson Poetry Prize and a Washington Star Literary grant. He was the author of Thurgood Marshall: Fighter for Justice (1969) and the editor of Black Man in the U.S. and the Promise of America (1970), with Lettie J. Austin and Sophia P. Nelson, and Many Shades of Black, with Stanton L. Wormley (1969).
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1940s/1940s-students
James Oliver Hopson (PhD 1948; diss: “Attitudes toward the Negro as an Expression of English Romanticism”). We believe that Hopson taught at Talladega College and was involved with the Talladega Little Theater.
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1940s/1940s-students
Thaddeus Mosley (BA 1950) worked for the U.S. Postal service and as a freelance writer for The Pittsburgh Courier after graduation. But he was soon recognized for his work as a sculptor. In 1968 he had a solo exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. His work is featured around the city and in major museums. He was a Pittsburgh Artist of the Year; he has won the Governor’s Award and a Service in the Arts Award from the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. With David Lewis, he prepared the University of Pittsburgh Press book, H. Thaddeus Mosley: African-American Sculptor (1997).
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1950s/1950s-students
Sophia Phillips Nelson (PhD 1951; diss: “Shelleyana, 1935-1949”). Sophia Phillips Nelson was the first black valedictorian of Pittsburgh’s Westinghouse High School (1934). She had a long career at West Virginia State University, where she served as Chair of the English department. With Lewis Henry Fenderson (Pitt PhD 1948) and Lettie J. Austin, she was the editor of The BlackMan and the Promise of America (1970).
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1950s/1950s-students
Naomi Johnson Townsend (PhD 1955; diss: “Edmund Burke: Reputation and Bibliography, 1850-1954”). Townsend became the Chair of English, Chair of the Humanities Division and, in 1973, the Academic Dean of Tougaloo College.
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1950s/1950s-students
Ralph G. Johnson (PhD 1961; diss: "A Criticial Third Edition of Edmund Tilney’s The Flour of Friendshippe”). Johnson taught at Le Moyne College, Dillard University, Rust College and he retired as a Professor of English from the University of Memphis.
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1960s/1960s-students
Sylvia Joyce Barksdale (’67) is Associate professor of Social Work at California University of Pennsylvania.
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1960s/1960s-students
Ed Roberson (’70). Roberson was born and raised in Pittsburgh. His first book of poetry, When Thy King Is a Boy was published in 1970, the year of his graduation, as a volume in the Pitt Poetry Series edited by Ed Ochester and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Roberson is the author of nine volumes of verse, including Etai-eken (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (University of Iowa Press, 1995, and winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Just In: Word of Navigational Change: New and Selected Work (Talisman House, 1998), Atmosphere Conditions (Green Integer, 1999, chosen by Nathanial Mackey for the National Poetry Series Award and a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Award), City Eclogue (Atelos, 2006), The New Wing of the Labyrinth (Singing Horse Press, 2009), and To See the Earth Before the End of the World, (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). Roberson’s poetry has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2004 and Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. His awards include the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Stephen Henderson Critics Award for Achievement in Literature, the Poetry Society’s 2008 Shelley Memorial Award, and an LA Times Book Award. Roberson taught for many years at Rutgers University. He now lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College and Northwestern.
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1960s/1960s-students
Roberson published in MSS: Writing at the University of Pittsburgh in 1961: “Four Songs at the Coming of Winter” and “Dirge” (poems), Ed Roberson (1961)
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1960s/1960s-footnotes
Gerald William Barrax (’69) is Professor emeritus in the English department at North Carolina State University, where he taught creative writing. Barrax has published poems in a number of magazines and journals. His books include: Another Kind of Rain (University of Pittsburgh P, 1970), An Audience of One (U of Georgia P, 1980), The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods (U of Kentucky P, 1984), Leaning Against the Sun (U of Arkansas P, 1992), and From a Person Sitting in Darkness: New and Selected Poems (LSU, 1998). Barrax is a member of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
https://www.english.pitt.edu/history-department/1960s/1960s-students