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| Jerry W. Ward, Jr. and Tyehimba Jess, July 2015 at the NEH Black Poetry Institute, University of Kansas |
In the summer of 1997, I first began to get some sense that one of my undergrad professors Jerry W. Ward Jr. had a highly respected reputation beyond our little campus at Tougaloo College. On campus, he was well-known for his high standards, along with deep and expansive knowledge about literature. But that was about it.
During the summer of 1997, I was a rising junior and participating in a UNCF/Mellon program at Emory University. At some point, a PhD student from Emory learned that I was a student at Tougaloo and said to me with a tone of disbelief, "you work with Jerry Ward? The Jerry Ward?" Before then, I hadn't thought enough about Ward's scholarly writings and his attendance at literature conferences and other gatherings taking place across the country.
When I returned to campus that fall, I had far more questions for Dr. Ward. He was amused that I was "discovering" who he was beyond Tougaloo. More importantly, we ramped up our conversations about literature, Richard Wright, the Black Arts Movement, and more. I'm not sure if it was simply becoming more experienced as a student or the outside knowledge that I had this nationally-recognized resource right at Tougaloo.
Either way, I began to benefit from Dr. Ward's knowledge of Black poetry, among other topics. I was thus pleased many years later when we got the opportunity to collaborate on NEH Summer Institutes directed by Maryemma Graham at the University of Kansas, first with "Making the Wright Connection: Reading Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom's Children" in 2010, "Don’t Deny My Voice: Reading and Teaching African American Poetry" in 2013, and "Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement" in 2015.
Those NEH Black poetry institutes gave Dr. Ward and me opportunities to work with others to share knowledge about the history and teaching of African American verse. In 2013, we collaborated with several resident faculty and 25 summer scholars, and we did the same in 2015. That’s a sizeable group of people studying, thinking about, and discussing African American poetry.
We may have taken Dr. Ward's participation for granted. That is, we didn’t think it unusual that he was a leading force in conceptualizing those NEH institutes. But limited resources have made it increasingly difficult for faculty in literary studies at HBCUs, or at teaching-focused institutions of any kind, to establish such well-respected reputations in scholarly discourse.
After all, Dr. Ward taught four courses per semester for much of his decades-long career, lived on a modest salary, rarely had access to a research-level library, and lacked the kinds of travel budgets that are standard for many others. Yet he produced thoughtful and illuminating scholarly writings and consistently participated in, and even led, scholarly gatherings like the NEH institutes on Black poetry.
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