Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes once described poet, educator, and activist Melvin B. Tolson as “the most famous Negro professor in the Southwest. Students from all over the world speak of him, revere him, remember him, and love him.” Hughes continued, saying that Tolson was “no highbrow. Kids from the cotton fields like him. Cowpunchers understand him. He is a great teacher of the kind of which any college might be proud…And the likes of him is found nowhere but in the great State of Texas—because there is only one Tolson!”
Melvin B. Tolson was born in 1898 in Missouri. His father was a Methodist preacher frequently transferred from church to church across the Midwest, resulting in the family moving from town to town. In 1919, Tolson began his college career at Fisk University but transferred to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania after his freshmen year for financial reasons. His first poem was published at 14 and was the first of many Tolson would release during his lifetime. Tolson felt the pull of teaching as a profession, so he joined the faculty of Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, in 1924 and taught English, directed the theater club, and organized the Wiley Forensic Society, the highly successful debate team that inspired a movie, starring Denzel Washington. In between all of this, Tolson married the love of his life Ruth Southall in 1922, and they had four children.
While at Wiley, Tolson taught hundreds of students, and many contributed to the modern civil rights movement. One student, Benjamin Bell, organized a campus branch of the NAACP. In 1948, former student Fred Lewis successfully sued the Harris County Citizens’ Party through the NAACP. This all-white political party had chosen all of the candidates for the local and county offices since 1874. “Lewis attributed the courage to take on the White establishment in his hometown to Tolson’s teachings.” Herman Sweatt, who successfully sued to integrate the University of Texas Law School, graduated from Wiley in 1934 and said that Tolson had the most influence on his life besides his father. Finally, one of the most famous former Tolson students and debate team member was James L. Farmer, Jr., one of the co-founders of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In his autobiography, Farmer recounted his time at Wiley and Tolson’s influence on pursuing his passions. “Tolson taught English, but that was the least of the things he taught. He stretched the minds of all whose minds would be stretched.” Tolson invited Farmer to his house to engage in debate and talk about important issues, and it was after one such long evening, Tolson gave Farmer advice he would never forget. “My boy, it’s customary for a professor to tell his students that the world is waiting for them with open arms. Well, that’s a lie. There are men waiting for you, all right—with a big stick. Learn how to duck, and counterpunch.”
Melvin Tolson was also an activist who helped organize sharecroppers in Arkansas, though his other advocacy work is less well-known. While at Wiley, he was once threatened with lynching if he did not leave the area, although the specifics around the event are unknown and subject to speculation. James Farmer believed it was related to the organization of a boycott, but Tolson’s son did not think so. “He was not an organizer of protests, according to his son. He provided instead its inspiration.” Tolson is probably most well-known for leading the winning Wiley debate team. He created and inspired strong debate teams that traveled the country in dilapidated automobiles participating in debate challenges with other colleges. In April 1929, the debate team defeated Tolson’s freshman year alma mater Fisk University in a vote of two to one. Tolson led his team to victory in the first interracial debate with Oklahoma City University the following year. They also debated with a team from England’s Oxford College when the English were on a goodwill trip across the United States. Of all of the winning debates Tolson and his students participated in, the crowning moment must have been the debate with the national champions, the University of Southern California. Driving to California in James Farmer’s father’s Dodge, the team prepared so well for this challenge that the leader of the USC team commented that the “Wiley team had a marvelous background of general knowledge.” In front of a mixed audience of 2,300 people, led by Tolson, the Wiley team bested the national champions in a heated debate.
Melvin B. Tolson is remembered as an activist, an advocate, and a mentor. He was also a playwright, poet, and writer who published several books of poetry and prose and won many awards for his distinguished career in writing. Tolson left Wiley in 1947 and moved to Oklahoma to teach English at Langston University. He was elected mayor of the historically Black town in which he resided, serving for eight years. A heavy smoker, doctors diagnosed him with cancer in April 1964. He succumbed to the disease over two years later while undergoing surgery in Dallas, Texas. While Tolson may have passed too early in life, his legacy lives on in the students he inspired. One student made this observation about Tolson: “Students would see Tolson coming across the campus, sometimes barefooted, and they would flock around him. He loved to argue—he would argue with a tree.”
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