Oral History: Melvin Tolson

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Transcript:

Melba Holt: We are just deeply honored that you agreed to participate in our Centennial Project called the Oklahoma Voices.  It is a project of the Metropolitan Oklahoma City Library, and it will be permanently found in the Oklahoma Room at the downtown library, so we would like to start asking you your name. 

MT: Melvin B. The B stands for Beaunorus Tolson Jr., and I was named after my father. 

MH: And your birth date? 

MT: My birth date is June 19, 1923. 

MH: And where we are located for this interview? 

MT: For this interview we are in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma at the Ralph Ellison Library. 

MH: Where were you born, Dr. Tolson? 

MT: I was born in my mother’s home in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

MH: And where did you grow up? 

MT:  I was taken just a few months later to Marshall, Texas where my father was professor of English at Wiley College. He had already gone down there over the summer.   

MH: What was it like where you grew up in the area of Wiley College? 

MT: Wiley College is in Marshall, Texas. Marshall, Texas is in east Texas and is sometimes called Piney Woods, Texas, and as I said I was born in 1923 and we are talking about a period of great segregation naturally. 

MH: Yes.   

MT: And so that was the address we had where I grew up in, going to segregated schools, living in a segregated environment.   

MH: What was your father’s name?   

MT: My father’s name was also Melvin B. Tolson. He was a professor of English at Wiley College as I said in Marshall, Texas 

MH: What was your mother’s name? 

MT: My mother, Ruth Mabel Southall Tolson was a native of Charlottesville, Virginia.   

MH: What were your parents like? 

MT: That is difficult to say.   

MH: In your opinion. 

MT: That is still more difficult to say.  They were good people.  My father was a forensics that is debate coach and drama coach and a writer.  He had been a poet since his early age. I don’t know how early, but we have our first picture of him as a senior in high school where he was the poet laureate of his class and wrote a poem for the senior class and he wrote for . . .   and of course, he continued for the rest of his life. My mother belonged to a generation of African American women who did not finish school.  She had jumped out of high school, but when the four children that she and my father had were growing up she decided to go back to school.  The college, Wiley College, where my father was teaching had many professors. I don’t know the exact number, but I would say dozens of professors whose wives had not finished school.  It was not something that African American women or even many white women of middle or lower classes did in the 1920s.  And so she went back to high school and then fortunately for us insofar as location was concerned, the high school, the segregated high school, was right across the street from Wiley College, and in fact many of the teachers in the high school had gone to the college.  Some of them were the wives of professors who had finished their college work there.  So that we high school students were aimed towards the college. Something else that was unusual is that although Marshall was and is a small town there were two black colleges in the town.  Wiley College which had been organized by the United Methodist Church, at that time it was the Methodist Episcopal Church, and about a half mile across town Bishop College which was organized by the Baptist church.  In addition, there was a third college, an all-white college, in this small town of approximately oh maybe 15 thousand people, and of course since that time the white college has been integrated. But to have a small town of 15 thousand people with three colleges in town, although none of them were very large. Wiley might have had 450 students, they were about the same size.  But they had very fine faculties and the faculties were encouraging and so it was a precious experience.   

MH: It is truly a unique . . . 

MT: Yes, a very unique situation. 

MH: Did you have brothers and sisters? 

MT: Yes.  I had two brothers and one sister.  I am the oldest of the four, and one of the good things about my family is that my father from an early age, I don’t remember how young I was.  I was oh, nine, ten, 11 or 12 years old.  My father urged all of his children, his four children, to go on and get not only their bachelor’s degrees, but he urged us to get our doctor’s degrees, and he did it I don’t’ say frequently, but oh he would gather us together and tell us again remember I want you to go on and get your doctor’s degrees, and the four sons did, each of us in a different field, mine in the field of French and Spanish.  The brother next to me in the field of history. The third brother in the field of biochemistry, and my sister instead of getting a Ph.D., after getting her master’s in library science, went on to get a second master’s in history. And I asked her why she didn’t go ahead and get a Ph.D. in library science and she said that it was the type of field which once you had the master’s there was really not much reason to get a Ph.D.  A lot of the people who got doctorates in it came from other fields and so many librarians who already had a master’s got a master’s in another field, and that is what she had finished in at the time of her death, a master’s in history.   

MH: Would you name your two brothers and their degree and your sister’s? 

MT: Yes. My brother next to me is named Arthur L. Tolson.  He is a little over a year younger than I, but he is still teaching. This past year he was given a plaque for having taught 40 years at Southern University in Baton Rouge, and he is still teaching.  The next brother, his name was Wiley W. Tolson.  He was not named after Wiley College although most people thought so.  Wiley Tolson and he took his degree, by the way my brother, Arthur, took his degree in the field of history, took his degree as I did at the University of Oklahoma. My brother, Wiley, took his degree in the field of biochemistry at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. And my sister finished her second master’s in history at Howard University in Washington. 

MH: How far back can you trace your family tree?  You named your parents. 

MT: I would have to go to the genealogical charts that I have prepared. At the time that Roots became popular if you remember was a period of which thousands, I would almost say millions, of families of every ethnic group decided to research their family tree.  And I did the same thing.  I went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and looked up Tolsons. My mother’s family was relatively easy because she came from a family which was very close there on the east coast in Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania, and a family which had regular reunions and which kept genealogical charts.  And my father’s family which came out to Missouri did not.  And so, it was quite an enjoyable job.  I don’t really recall how far back I went.  I remember that like many African American families, the family is mixed with black African, with American Indian and with Caucasian, and I remember that because one of the Caucasian ancestors was reputed to have come from Birmingham, England.  It is really interesting that once when I was, we were, I was teaching at the University of Oklahoma we were interviewing a prospective professor of Spanish from Chile in South America and his first name was Tolson although he was Spanish, I mean Latino, and so after giving the lecture that prospective professors or candidates for the professorship have to give, he dropped by my office and we started talking about having the same name and oddly enough he said in the course of the conversation that one of his ancestors who had come to South America had come from Birmingham, England.  So, we decided that perhaps we were distantly related.  

MH: That is I have to say really, really, really remarkable. That is remarkable. 

MT: But insofar as the black ancestors I don’t know of course what parts of Africa they came from. And the Indian ancestors either.  My father spoke of them several times, but . . . and my grandmother, his mother, was said to be half Indian and in fact she looked it, said to have been half Cherokee, but we don’t know the specific details about the ancestry.   

MH: Okay.  I was just going to ask you if you remember the actual name of your grandparents. 

MT: Oh, yeah. They were Tolsons.   

MH: Do you remember their first and last names? 

MT: Yes.  My grandfather’s name was Alonzo. 

MH: That way we could complete your history . . . 

MT: And he was one of about somewhere between, I would have to go back and look at the chart, about ten siblings and my grandmother Lera I don’t remember her maiden name although I have it in my papers at home. 

MH: Now are they your father’s parents? 

MT: Yeah. My father’s parents. Yes.   

MH: And do you remember the names of your grandparents on your mother’s side? 

MT: No. Not off hand I don’t. 

MH: If it comes to you during the course of our interview you can feel free to remind me though.  Did you enjoy school as a young person? 

MT: Oh, yes, yes.  I can’t imagine anything else.  Oh, yes.  One thing we were, as I said, it was a segregated school.  The teachers were encouraging and the companionship, and so we knew we were headed for one of the two colleges there in town so it was really an invigorating experience through all the years.   

MH: That is just really good that you had that much opportunity to go to college with that much encouragement. 

MT: It was taken for granted that you were going. Yes.  

MH: That was excellent.  Do you have any stories from your childhood that you would like to share, that really are especially fond for you? 

MT: I don’t think of any off hand. 

MH: If you do before the interview is over you can tell us.  Did you have any teachers that especially inspired you or gave you a strong influence or that could in your early education or your college education that made you may make the determination? 

MT: Well.  Shall I say that I didn’t have any of my teachers who were not good influences on me. 

MH: They are probably happy to hear that.  

MT: And so I don’t know. Each of them of course was quite different and there were things that each of them brought to the teaching that was memorable. 

MH: Can you recall any one person that might have played a role of kindness in your life, or they were especially kind to you that you would like to name in your interview? 

MT: The person I would name principally of course would be my father. 

MH: Okay.  Has your life turned out differently in any way than you thought as a young person that it might have? 

MT: No. I don’t know whether I would have become a college professor if my father had not been one, you see.  And as I said, my father encouraged all four of his children from time to time.  Not every week, but from time to time and I know of course you don’t remember individual times, but you remember this time, another of my brothers or sister remembers another time. He encouraged us as I said to go on to college, but to get our BAs, our MAs and our PhDs. And that was done until it was taken for granted that that was what you were going to do even if you didn’t do it in the time period that some people thought you might or that you could have, but eventually you were going to do it.  So that becoming a college professor was just something that was almost taken for granted.  Now my younger brother, the brother who went into biochemistry, went in to work with the National Institutes of Health and into research work; in fact, he was on the research team that came out, Surgeon General’s team that came out with the material on the harm that nicotine and tobacco does that came out in 19 . . . I forget the exact year, but whenever it came out, he was a member of that research team, and it stopped him from smoking.  It didn’t stop me, but it stopped him.  

MH: You kept going. 

MT: Well, I stopped quite often until I finally did.  

MH: I would like to ask you with that in mind if you could just take us on a journey of your career in terms of the time you finished school, your teaching career, how it formulated, the places you might have taught, and just take us through the positions you held and then tell us a little bit about those experiences that you feel led from within to share with us. 

MT: After my bachelor’s degree, I got a job in a rural school in east Texas and I taught the 5th and 6th grades and 7th and 8th grade English.  I didn’t . . . I couldn’t imagine when I accepted the job how I would get all those subjects in during each school day.  That is another story.  It is what they did.  But anyway, after that I taught there one year and the next year I went to theological school.  My interest had turned away. . . I never expected to stay in this elementary school teaching position anyway. I was interested in philosophy and so I went there and then after that I started teaching at . . . I finished there in 1946 and started teaching at Prairie View.  I had majored in English and philosophy in college and started teaching English at Prairie View College which was Prairie View A & M at that time, A & M College in Texas and there by chance a need developed for someone to teach a French course.  Well, I had been interested in it in college, but we didn’t offer a major in it or even a minor, but I had just studied it and so I offered to teach it and became interested more and more in it and gradually shifted over from teaching English to teaching French completely, and then in 1949 I decided to work on the master’s degree.  At that time Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher had succeeded in opening up the universities in Oklahoma. Also, at that time my father and mother had left Wiley.  They left Wiley in 1947 and had come to Langston and so I came up and talked to him and so we decided to see since he was living in Langston to see if I could go to Oklahoma A & M at that time.  This was just about 20 or so miles away, and so they said come on over and so I enrolled in Oklahoma A & M.  By the way five of us African Americans enrolled in the fall of 1949.  Mrs. Davis had gone and had opened it up actually, in the summer. 

MH: Is this the Mrs. Davis that integrated OSU? 

MT: Yes.   

MH: Yes.  We interviewed her. 

MT: Oh really. Good. Yes.  She had gone there that summer. At the time I did not know her, but as she was a regular teacher, I guess she went back to work that summer and we went in in the fall, five of us, three men and two women, and after the first semester three dropped out, the two women and one of the men dropped out not because there had been any obvious prejudice, you know, any restrictions.  But they said the pressure was more than they felt like continuing with.  So, two of us continued to go that year and got the master’s degree in the spring.  And so, then I went back to Prairie View A & M and continued teaching, and then in 1955... well in 1954, I applied for and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the University of Paris at the Sorbonne and so in 1955 and 1956 I studied at the University of Paris and took an advanced diploma in contemporary literature there. And while I was there my father who had been appointed back in 1947 or 1948, I forget the exact year, excuse me, had been appointed the official poet of the Republic of Liberia and this came through to go to the second inauguration of President Tubman’s presidency in Monrovia and Liberia.  As I said I was studying in Paris at the time and my father stopped through and we had a nice two or three days together.  It was also interesting because the great African American writer, Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, was living in Paris.  He had left the United States. He had decided that the racial situation as James Baldwin did later, decided the racial situation was just too much to bear.  And so he was living in Paris and I had met him and my father had known him in Chicago and New York several years before, and so when my father came through from Liberia, we had lunch with Richard Wright there in Paris.  Then after Paris I came back to Prairie View, and then I thought about working on the doctorate.  I thought about the University of Texas.  I thought about various universities, but I decided in talking with my parents that I would try the University of Oklahoma since I could visit my parents very frequently.  I could even live with them in the vacation period.  So, I came up in the summer of 1958 to study at the University of Oklahoma.  I decided to do it that way because I didn’t want to take a year off from my job teaching, get caught at the university and find out that I didn’t like it and they didn’t like me.  So, what I decided to do was to come and study a summer and see how I liked it.  I liked the situation and they liked me and offered me a graduate assistantship in teaching French.  So, then I went back and worked another year at Prairie View and took a leave of absence and came to the University of Oklahoma to study for the doctorate and that was in 1959. Then in 1961 one day the head of the department and I were crossing the OU campus and he suggested that I stay in Oklahoma, and I told him that I was on leave from a college in Texas, Prairie View.  He knew that, and I told him, I think he said, “well think about it.” So, I talked it over with my parents and so we decided well why not take a chance.  I could always leave. So, I told him that I would stay and so beginning in 1961 I became a member of the University of Oklahoma faculty and stayed there until I retired in 1992. 

MH: When you were at the University of Oklahoma did you ever have any administrative duties or did you primarily teach? 

MT: I never wanted any.  I was asked, yes, I was asked by various faculty members of the department sometimes to become, or try to become, to apply to become head of the department, but I never wanted to.  I don’t know whether that was paternal influence or not because my father had never wanted that, and he thought it was administrators were necessary of course. 

MH: Yeah, they are. 

MT: They are absolutely necessary, but unless you want to do that why go into it? And I did not. It was not something that I wanted to do, to spend my time sitting up and administrating, deciding what classes were going to be offered, who was going to teach them and that sort of thing.  I was not interested in that at all. 

MH: What about the approach that you had to teaching? Did you write and travel a lot to supplement and increase your teaching?  Would you like to talk about that? 

MT: No. Well, I am not a writer.  I never was.  I did write articles, reviewed books and would go to and went of course to professional meetings and things, but that was principally what I did.  Teaching was what I was really interested in. Finding ways to, how shall I put it?  Finding ways to overcome the resistance of persons to learning another language. 

MH: Some of that is old-fashioned fear, and that is a gift of tongue I might add.  If you were to advise someone who wanted to have a career in languages, what would you say to them? What would be your advice to someone seeking a career in languages? 

MT: In foreign languages? Of course you begin by studying. It depends on which one you are picking.  If you can, and I forgot to mention that I did this in the summer of 1960 because the Ph.D. was not just in French.  It was in French and Spanish, and I had not studied Spanish.  I had studied it on my own, but I did not have any college credit or . . . and when I came along in high school it wasn’t offered yet.  Oh, yes, when I came along in high school Latin was what everybody took. It was not until years later, oh, I forget how many years later, that my high school began to offer Spanish and then later French.  So that I never had a chance to take it there, but I started studying it when I was teaching. I started studying it on my own and then as I said when I was doing the doctorate, the doctorate was going to be in French and Spanish, and I would not have gotten credit for undergraduate Spanish courses.  So what I did was I went down to Mexico to the National University of Mexico and enrolled and studied there for the summer and then came back and I was able to take courses at the graduate level. I went down with the determination to cram as much into that summer, which I did.  In fact, so much so that several times people would look at me and ask, you know, if I could help them in English and I would tell them in Spanish, sorry I don’t speak English just to stay concentrated on the language.  So, for a person who wants to do it, if the person has the opportunity in any way to go to the country and to limit his or her contacts with members of his own linguistic group, because for example, at the University of Paris we lived, the building in which I lived in there were both males and females and there were quite a few Americans even studying. Well, when you get together with five, six, seven or eight students, what do you speak?  English.  You might decide to speak French, but after a few minutes there something comes up, just the feel of the American language gets you to switch to English you see, and so the student who wants to learn a foreign language, no matter what language, which it is, you know, whether it is Chinese or Dutch or Swahili or whatever had better concentrate as much as possible when he is in the country on being with native speakers of that language as long as he can.  

MH: That is some very, very unexpected helpful advice.  Dr. Tolson, are you married? 

MT: No.   

MH: Dr. Tolson would you say in this interview that you have had any experience with any of your mentors in your . . . it sounds like your father’s role was very, very important to you and that this is a second-generation university level, almost an apprenticeship, that you had with him? Is there any other person that you would like to talk about in terms of their mentoring that thought to mold you because it sounds like in a very significant time the OU professor really encouraged you to go on and . . . 

MT:  There were a series of professors, for example, my professor at the... the head of the department at that time at Oklahoma A & M encouraged me to go to Paris to study.  

MH: Would you like to name him in your interview? 

MT: And his name slips my mind because it has been decades and decades, and when you are as I am at this time past 84 years old names are blurs. 

MH: You have been in the academic community all this time. 

MT: Well, all my life.  I have never known any other life.  And then there was a Dr. Oliver Cox of Wylie College, a professor of sociology and a distinguished author and scholar, who was a very fine intellectual influence on me.  He was a friend of my father’s.  I must say that there have been through my father, there have been people that I have met and gained influence from that I would not have otherwise. For example, as I said my father was a poet and a professor and he knew many of the finest writers in the African American community, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and as I said, Richard Wright and others and so they visited sometimes our home and you would listen and talk with them and so those . . . there have been innumerable occasions in which those things happened that I would have to make a list. 

MH: I am just thrilled that you are able to share their names and that unique part of your history and that you would be able to leave that legacy with the people in the State of Oklahoma.  It is outstanding. I would like for you to talk about some of the buildings that have had memories in terms of that building at OU that you were honored with along with Dr. Henderson. 

MT: That was done by the African American students and alumni. When Dr. Henderson and I came to OU, as I said I came on the faculty in 1961 and he came over a very short time later and we of course were talking with black students and I can remember we got to talking with each other and we found out that I had been talking to several students who were coming over to the house about starting a black student’s association because we are talking now about the middle 1960s when the movement was beginning and was spreading.  I found out that he had been talking to graduate students, black graduate students that had the same ideas. So, he and I decided to get our two groups together, which we did, and they started the first black student’s association. And that is the reason that the building, the Henderson Tolson Cultural Center, was named by black alumni and students because of the work that we did with the black association of students in the early generation at OU. 

MH: I remember that Dr. Henderson in his early integration efforts.  You know, I am an OU grad and a Langston grad and Dr. Henderson is one of my mentors and I have talked with him and his wife about trying to get them in these interviews so we hope that we can tie down . . . 

MT: So, I told him when I come back this evening because I called him yesterday and I told him I would tell you about it. 

MH: Please let him know. 

MT: I will. 

MH: And let him know that we do want to preserve it in the Oklahoma Room for the rest of, you know, our history and it is our Centennial Project.  Out of respect to you we would like to make sure that if there is any statement that you would like to make concerning higher education and your hope for children and adults in the State of Oklahoma because you have had a chance to watch it progress from a very segregated society into a quite open society with all kinds of opportunities.  You have had a chance to see blacks in the regents of higher education and you have been able to climb that pinnacle in higher education there at the University of Oklahoma and anything that you could say that would talk to encourage any black children as they pursue degrees in higher education.  We talked about the pursuit in the languages, but anything that you might say that would be helpful.  We would appreciate it.   

MT: I wish I were something which I am not, and that is a public speaker.  If it were my father sitting here you would have another hour or two of great advice today. I do not have that ability, but I must say that one of the things which I would stress and which I do at every opportunity with young blacks is actually the same thing that my father stressed to his children.  Get the education.  Study hard and keep going despite any of the obstacles that seem to rise in your path.  As I am sitting here I am thinking of several high school students who were in my classes who had the ability and did not go on to the two colleges that were in that town, to either of the two colleges, and I am sorry that at that time I as their contemporary at 15, 16, 17 years old did not have the vision or the maturity to tell them that they could work and go to school when they could. 

MH: But you are doing it now and that is so wonderful. 

MT: Yes.  But it will never erase the pictures from my mind of several of my high school classmates who had the mental ability and to whom I didn’t know enough to say well work in the summer and go get a job at the college and work and go because that is what many students did you see.  I am thinking right now of what one of my father’s debaters who is now in her 90s who worked at Wiley, sweeping the halls, cleaning up and doing things to work her way through school there at Wiley, but I didn’t know it at the time of course and I didn’t know enough to say it to several of my classmates living there in sight of the college of one of the two colleges, you know, of the colleges, Wiley and Bishop, to say “work, save your money and you can make it through,” and that is what I would like to say.  

MH: That almost brings tears to my eyes as you said that.  Honestly, Dr. Tolson, I am just going to say that that touches a personal chord in my life because I personally had that very unique experience that you are talking about.  You saw people that had the ability and you regret that you weren’t able to speak that into their lives, but as you told me that you had grown up with a father who had told you to get that terminal degree. I think that in this interview for the sake of anybody with that kind of ability listening, that I would like to add this to that dialogue.  I was the first female graduate of a college degree in my family, and Dr. Henderson was one of my teachers and I was a counselor at OU in placement and I was going to go out into the professional world as a psychologist. Dr. Henderson had the insight to tell me wait until you finish your doctorate.  Stay here until you finish your doctorate.  You can finish in one more year, but what he didn’t understand was with me being the first person finishing college was that I had all this debt and these creditors were hounding me but I had nobody to tell me that, but he did do that and between his advice that he gave me and this appeal that you are making in such an earnest way I believe we will be able to reach some of those students with that potential that will allow them to see it through and tough it out and finish those terminal degrees and get those terminal degrees before they leave the campus because it is so much harder to finish it after you leave the campus.  You can finish it, but it is unnecessary that it is that much harder. . . 

MT: Yes.  It is much harder. And you make think that you have enough desire and energy and find after you get out there it dissolves away. 

MH: Yes. That's right, and the distractions of life and the demands and responsibility of life can come in and consume the destiny and that is what you are trying to make sure that you don’t let escape as a result of this interview, and I believe that the passion with which you made that statement when you hear your interview I believe that that is one of the main reasons we were able to hear this Oklahoma Voice. Thank you so much, Dr. Tolson.  You tell Dr. Henderson please tell him we would love for his voice to participate. We want you to greet us with your languages. 

MT:  Just in French because I would have to stop and think about it in Spanish. 

MH: We want to know however you see fit. 

MT: I am just going to say that it is very difficult to compose sentences with persons that speak the language.  [Speaking French] 

MH: Would you interpret it for us, Dr. Tolson? 

MT: I merely said it is very difficult to compose. I have forgotten now exactly what I said.  It is very difficult to compose sentences for people who do not understand the language, but that one of the things that you want to impress on students is the importance of studying and of learning a foreign language.  I think that is what I said.   

MH: We thank you and we thank you for being a beautiful Oklahoma Voice. 

MT: Thank you.  Thank you.