ALUMNI NEWS: SENIOR KAPPA SPOTLIGHT
Dr. Ralph J. Bryson Reflects on 59 Years of Service to Education and 70 Years in the Bond
I n 2020, Dr. Ralph J. Bryson—56 th Elder Watson Diggs Awardee, Grand Historian Emeritus, and 64 th Laurel Wreath Laureate—sat down with Samuel Odom (Beta Gamma 1993), Ph.D., Bertis D. English, Ph.D. (Eta Chi 1990), and John J. Ivery, Sr., M.S. (Beta Zeta 1957), to share various experiences and insights regarding his educational background as well as his guiding philosophy as an English professor and department chair at Alabama State University (ASU) in Montgomery. The challenges Dr. Bryson faced and the successes he experienced under several ASU presidents during almost six decades at the institution were two of the first subjects we broached. In responding to our ques- tions, he also explored societal change, counterculture and the civil rights movement. Dr. Bryson spent fifty-nine years as a faculty member at ASU, which was known as the Alabama State College for Negroes (ASCN) when he arrived in 1953 after completing his dissertation titled “The Promotion of Interracial Understanding through the Study of Ameri- can Literature” at Ohio State University in Columbus. Harper Council Trenholm, president of ASCN, re- cruited him to Montgomery. For the next decade, Bryson was associate professor of
English in the Department of English and Foreign Languages. He became full professor and department chair in 1963. For nearly 50 years after, he served the institution in many capaci- ties, to include chairing the Humanities Division, the Faculty Senate, and the Ly- ceum Committee. As further indication of the respect Bryson garnered at ASU, he was University Marshal and carried its grand mace during commencement exercises from 2010 until his second retirement in 2012 (he retired temporarily in 1992). Before joining ASNC in 1953, Dr. Bryson instructed English courses at South- ern Pines High School in North Carolina; at Southern University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and at Miles College in Fairfield, Alabama. He likewise was an adjunct English professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and a guest lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. During the Second World War, his two years of army service included a tour in the European Theater of Operations. The postwar Double V campaign (victory abroad, victory at home) that African American war veterans helped lead during the late 1940s and into the early 1950s resulted in a great deal of social and political change during Bryson’s early years at ASNC. In 1954, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s first Brown v. Board of Education ruling, ASNC administrators demanded
state officials remove “for Negroes” from the name of the college. As the civil rights movement progressed, many students, faculty, and other individuals associated with Alabama State College (ASC) played important roles in the movement. In 1955, for example, Dr. Bryson’s departmental col- league and English professor Jo Ann Robinson mimeo- graphed the documents advertising the 382-day bus boycott in which the Rev- erend Martin Luther King, Jr., Ph.D., his wife Coretta, and thousands of unknown local activists subsequently participated. Reverend King pastored the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which Dr. Bryson and many other ASC employees, students, and pa- trons attended. King, in fact, baptized Dr. Bryson. The large number of freedom
94 | SPRING 2020 ♦ THE JOURNAL
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