Leslie M. “Doc” Collins, who became a living legend at Fisk University during more than half a century teaching English and African-American literature at the historic institution, died Sunday evening at his home in Nashville. Collins was 99.
Collins, a teaching peer of artist Aaron Douglas, American poet laureate Robert Hayden and poet and librarian Arna Bontemps, taught full-time at Fisk from 1945 until his official retirement in 1979. He continued to teach several courses a year until 2008.
During the course of his career as an academician, Collins accumulated a roster of unknown, ambitious students who, today, are among the nation’s who’s who in the literary world, including noted poet Nikki Giovanni.
Other Fisk students, who did not take classes from him, later sought his knowledge, advice and counsel including two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis who said in a brief phone interview Monday that Collins “was invaluable to me” in research and writing of his 1980 book, “When Harlem Was in Vogue.”
Collins came of age during the Harlem Renaissance and got to know many of its principal figures, including Charles S. Johnson, who would later leave New York City for Nashville where he would become president of Fisk.
Collins met Arna Bontemps and Aaron Douglas during that era and worked for two years as personal secretary to the late legend Paul Roberson.
