Melvin B. Tolson - Liberia's Poet Laureate - Guthrie, OK - Dead Poets' Society Memorials on Waymarking.com

The final resting place of poet, educator, and politician Melvin B. Tolson is near the center of Guthrie's Summit View Cemetery. His upright monument is on the east side of Block 41, just a few feet from the road.


From wikipedia (edited):

Melvin Beaunorus Tolson (February 6, 1898 – August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several long historical poems. His work was influenced by his study of the Harlem Renaissance, although he spent nearly all of his career in Texas and Oklahoma. In 1947 Liberia named Tolson its poet laureate.

Born in Moberly, Missouri, Tolson was one of four children of Reverend Alonzo Tolson, a Methodist minister, and Lera (Hurt) Tolson, a seamstress of African-Creek ancestry. Alonzo Tolson was also of mixed race, the son of an enslaved woman and her white master. He served at various churches in the Missouri and Iowa area until settling longer in Kansas City.

Melvin Tolson graduated from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1919. He enrolled at Fisk University but transferred to Lincoln University, Pennsylvania the next year for financial reasons. Tolson graduated with honors in 1924.

In 1922, Melvin Tolson married Ruth Southall of Charlottesville, Virginia, whom he had met as a student at Lincoln University.

In 1930-31 Tolson took a leave of absence from teaching to study for a Master's degree at Columbia University. His thesis project, "The Harlem Group of Negro Writers", was based on his extensive interviews with members of the Harlem Renaissance. His poetry was strongly influenced by his time in New York. He completed his work and was awarded the master's degree in 1940.

After graduation, Tolson and his wife moved to Marshall, Texas, where he taught speech and English at Wiley College (1924–1947).

In addition to teaching English, Tolson used his high energies in several directions at Wiley. He built an award-winning debate team, the Wiley Forensic Society. During their tour in 1935, they broke through the color barrier and competed against the University of Southern California, which they defeated. There he also co-founded the black intercollegiate Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, and directed the theater club. In addition, he coached the junior varsity football team.

In 1947 Tolson began teaching at Langston University, a historically black college in Langston, Oklahoma, where he worked for the next 17 years. He was a dramatist and director of the Dust Bowl Theater at the university.

In 1947 Liberia appointed Tolson its Poet Laureate. In 1953 he completed a major epic poem in honor of the nation's centennial, the Libretto for the Republic of Liberia.

Tolson entered local politics and served three terms as mayor of Langston from 1954 to 1960.

In the late 1940s, after he left his teaching position at Wiley, the Washington Tribune hired Tolson to write a weekly column, which he called Cabbage and Caviar.

Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), another major work, is in the form of an epic poem in an eight-part, rhapsodic sequence. It is considered a major modernist work.

Tolson's papers are housed at the Library of Congress.

Tolson is a central character in the movie The Great Debaters (2007), directed by and starring Denzel Washington in the role of Tolson. Oprah Winfrey produced the film, based on Wiley College's debate with University of Southern California (USC). (In the movie, the team debates Harvard, not USC).

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