A couple of weeks ago my graduate seminar concluded by reading the late Julius S. Scott’s classic work of history, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. And I had forgotten, until this re-reading, that the book closes with a reference to the great Black feminist playwright, poet, and novelist Ntozake Shange. Scott ends by mentioning Shange’s ode to Touissant Louverture, which was included in her groundbreaking and award-winning choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.
For Scott, Shange’s homage to Toussaint served as a fitting conclusion to his study of how the story of the Haitian Revolution traveled around the Caribbean and the Americans, carried by Black mariners, higglers, fugitives, maroons, revolutionaries, and poets to very distant shores and times. But Scott and Shange were also connected in another, little-known way. Both of these great scholars of “Afro-American Currents” once taught at Rice University. Indeed, they both once taught, though at different times, a course in the department where I now work: Rice’s Department of History.
Shange arrived to teach at Rice as a Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Spring 1983 semester, offering an English course on Afro-American literature and “a history department course on the Reconstruction and its effects throughout the entire country, not just the South.” (Oh, to have taken that course!) On February 2, 1983, she gave a reading from her work in Sewall Hall 301, a room in which I have listened to countless talks over the years.
Scott arrived three years later for the 1986-1987 academic year, fresh from the completion of his dissertation at Duke University. Like Shange, he was hired through a Mellon-funded program to teach two courses: “Origins and Development of Slave Societies in the America” in Fall 1986, and “The Second Reconstruction: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States” in Spring 1987, both in the history department. Years later, one of his students (now my colleague) would speak about the impact of those classes on his life and career.
Both Scott and Shange were connected to Houston in other ways. Scott had grown up in the city; as a first-grader, he desegregated MacGregor Elementary School, though he and another Black student were initially forced to use a segregated bathroom. (As detailed in a new biography of Scott, his parents learned of this indignity when they heard “Scotty” praying one night, “Thank you God for letting me have my own bathroom at school.")
Shange later remembered being drawn to Rice by the proximity it provided to her extended family. Her sister, Bisa Williams, who went on to a distinguished career as a diplomat, was teaching as an English lecturer at Rice when Shange came and serving as advisor to the Black Students Union.
Yet if Houston offered family and community, Rice University at the time was still in the midst of its second founding, still in the beginning stages of becoming a university welcome to all. When Scott arrived in 1986, twenty-two years after the matriculation of the first Black student at Rice, the progress of desegregation at the university remained slow. Joining Scott at Rice that fall as part of a Mellon cluster hire was the great historian of the family and women in slavery, Brenda Stevenson. But as the student newspaper noted at the time, the hiring of Scott and Stevenson doubled the number of Black professors at Rice in any department. And none of the three scholars mentioned here (Shange, Scott, and Stevenson) were retained for more than one year.
Nonetheless, though they did not overlap or teach at Rice for very long, the legacies that Shange and Scott left behind (like those of “The Common Wind”) were not small. And their impacts can still be found scattered across the archives of the university. In the 1983 student yearbook, for example, there are several photos of an intramural basketball team whose members were Black women. The team is featured in a spread about the Black Students Union and their faculty advisor. And the name the team chose was “For Colored Girls.”
