Remembering Katharine Newman

After earning my doctorate in 1978, I sought out professional organizations related to my career as a specialist in nineteenth-century American and African American writing and joined such established groups as the Modern Language Association (MLA), its regional affiliate the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA), and their African American counterpart the decades-old College Language Association (CLA), as well as a new, little-known group called the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS). This brainchild of the late Katharine Newman and her American literature colleagues radically criticized the lack of racial, ethnic, gender, and religious diversity that was the unfortunate hallmark, in those days, of the MLA. Katharine and her group quickly caught my attention because I had just experienced an American education largely designed to legitimize the literary productions of white men, who essentially ignored or were mostly wrong about people like me in their texts. After joining MELUS, I used a general-interest questionnaire from Katharine to ask why so few black intellectuals held leadership roles in her own organization, and she answered by challenging me to become involved in its development and help them devise strategies for making the literary canon of the United States more inclusive and accurate, tasks that have engaged my intellectual energy to this day. In the process, I enjoyed learning about MELUS in the early 1970s, shared its founders' outrage over MLA parochialism, and was inspired by Katharine's dreams and enthusiasm. Katharine Newman or "Mother MELUS," as she became known to us, kept me motivated and active in this movement less for political and more for scholarly understanding in American writing, saying that she knew MELUS would remain healthy as long as I remained concerned. Over the years, that meant I organized and presented papers on scholarly panels, published a variety of works reflecting MELUS values, and was elected secretary (1986-88) and then president (1988-92) of the ever-growing organization. At the 1982 MLA Convention held in San Francisco, I first met Katharine in person, after presenting an essay on a panel organized by the late Amy Ling and including Paula Gunn Allen, Reuben Rios, and Shirley Lim. At this time, there existed no Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, or Toni Morrison Societies, Charles Chesnutt Association, Richard Wright Circle, or even an MLA Division on Black American Literature and Culture. Indeed, R. Baxter Miller attended and solicited signatures at our 1982 MLA session to help found the latter. When MLA finally ratified this Division, I immediately joined it but never left MELUS because Katharine Newman shocked me by being the first white literary scholar I ever met who seemed unafraid of human racial and ethnic diversity. I had grown up in Franklin, Virginia, among whites so insecure in the presence of peoples with color that they demanded strict segregation in housing, education, transportation, and religion--in virtually every aspect of life. I found it difficult to believe that white people who were as emotionally accepting of the humanity of others as Katherine was, actually existed. But she was not intimidated by colored skin or much else in life, showing typical determination when, as an elderly, arthritic woman with a broken arm, she flew alone from California to North Carolina to attend the 1989 MELUS Conference at East Carolina University. Indeed, she regarded MELUS as a community of scholars of all racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds who spoke and wrote from their various perspectives about uniquely American experiences. For her, there was no question about the legitimacy of these experiences, as had been the case in my formal education; she knew that the American story would not be properly told unless scholars placed our myriad voices and languages before the world's audience. …