As a graduate English student at a Michigan university more than 40 years ago, Melba Joyce Boyd sat in on a seminar that featured a speaker who has had a profound impact on her career.
The speaker was a highly regarded African-American professor of English from the University of Michigan by the name of Darwin Turner, and his topic was Black drama. Black professors on predominantly White university campuses were rare then. Rarer still was an acknowledgment of African-American studies as worthy of scholarship.
“A professor of mine told me that in a meeting with the department chair and the university president, the department head had said he didn’t think Black American literature was a legitimate genre and he wouldn’t recognize it,” says Boyd, now a distinguished professor and chair of Africana studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. “He was overruled by the president, so he had to offer it. [But] that’s the level of resistance that was coming from the power structure. It made it very difficult for me. And in the throes of this, Darwin shows up.”
Perhaps as much as anyone, Turner, who was one of the first directors of the University of Iowa’s African-American studies program, helped give the field credibility in the academy both nationally and internationally. Turner, who died in 1991, was a prolific writer and scholar who went on to hire and mentor young scholars in African-American studies.
“He laid the foundation,” says Boyd. “He created opportunities for people like myself to be hired to teach what we wanted to teach, not what others wanted us to teach. These programs gave us the time and space to do scholarship in that area. People like Darwin helped to solidify the curriculum as a legitimate and acceptable part of the canon.”
Adds Dr. Horace Porter, chair of African-American Studies at the University of Iowa:
“Professor Darwin Turner was a singular figure in the establishment of African-American studies as we know it today. He was also a remarkable scholar of African-American literature.”
