Sheffey Lecture Program

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY Presents Sixth Annual

RUTHE T. SHEFFEY LECTURE IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMALE STUDIES

RUTHE T. SHEFFEY L E CTU R E

Celebrating the Contributions of African-American Women to the World of Letters

A Lecture by

DR. JOANNE VEAL GABBIN, ‘67 Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Professor of English James Madison University

Thursday, March 31, 2022 11:00 a.m.

Zoom Webinar Lecture Faculty, students, alumni and classes from Morgan and other universities and the larger community are invited to join us at this annual event, and to require student assignments on this important lecture. &e=

THE ANNUAL RUTHE T. SHEFFEY LECTURE IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMALE STUDIES

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he first endowed lectureship in the history of the College of Liberal Arts, a permanent activity in the intellectual life of the college and university, the Annual Ruthe T. Sheffey Lecture in African-American Female Studies was established in 2014

by Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey, a 1947 graduate of Morgan State College and Professor of English Emerita, who served on the faculty of Morgan for sixty-two years.

The aim of the lecture is to preserve the African-American literary legacy and enrich the learning environment on the University campus by bringing notable African-American female scholars to campus annually, during Women’s History Month (in March), to present lectures focusing on the African-American literary tradition and the role it has played in the lives of African Americans.

Dr. Sheffey hopes, through the lecture, to provide a foundation of courage and emotional security for African-American youth and, in her own words, “to have [them] remember the sources of hope, selfrespect, resilience and endurance that fortified their ancestors in the bleak and brutish Dantean landscape of slavery and beyond.”

The 2022 lecture is the sixth in a series of annual lectures at Morgan Sate University that lives in memory of iconic women who served not only as cultural anchors, but also as reservoirs of love.

DR. RUTHE T. SHEFFEY Professor of English Emerita Longest Continuously-Serving Professor in Morgan’s 155-Year History 1949 — 2011

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DR. RUTHE T. SHEFFEY Professor of English Emerita

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r. Ruthe T. Sheffey is a Morgan Legend! For over a half-century, she was the standard bearer for the Department of English and Language Arts, and she was its benchmark for excellence in teaching, in scholarship and in service to the profession and the community. She remains symbol and substance—both form and fable—of the Great Morgan Tradition of distinguished graduates who return to the University to renew the pursuit of excellence that was their passion as students and to carry on the standard of excellence that was their yardstick for achievement.

With a 1947 Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from Morgan to her credit, Ruthe T. Sheffey went on to earn the Master of Arts Degree from Howard University and the Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She also did post-doctoral study at The Johns Hopkins University. After a brief period of teaching English and French at Claflin College in Orangeburg, South Carolina, she returned to her Alma Mater as an Instructor of English in 1949. The rest is history!

For 62 years, Dr. Sheffey was one of Morgan’s Pillars of Excellence in every respect. A master teacher, a curriculum innovator and builder, an academic leader, a brilliant nationally-known scholar and an unwavering supporter of Morgan; Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey was indeed, and in deed as well as words, the gentle and eloquent voice proclaiming the high standards and remarkable achievement of what is now Maryland’s only designated public urban doctoral research university.

Over the years, Dr. Sheffey was a teacher par excellence, one who set a record as the second longestserving member of the faculty, second only to her former colleague, the late Dr. Jean Fisher Turpin, a fellow alumna who devoted sixty-five years of service to Morgan as its resident scholar in English grammar. During this period Dr. Sheffey’s name was synonymous with excellence in teaching.

Whether in classes for Freshman English, or Humanities, or Advanced Composition, or Shakespeare, or Women’s Literature in the African Diaspora, Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey was one who, like Chaucer’s clerk, would “gladly learn and gladly teach.” It is said that, in the classroom, she lit up the eyes of her students and filled the room with joy—the joy of learning and growing and becoming better increasingly.

Her consummate, polished skill in teaching and inspiring her students produced a Pulitzer-Prizewinning short story writer in James Alan McPherson; a Chief Judge of Maryland’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, in retired Judge Robert M. Bell; a head speechwriter for President William Jefferson Clinton in Terry Edmonds; academic leaders in Associate Dean Barbara Griffin and former Dean Burney J. Hollis; university professors in Dr. Linda M. Carter, the late Dr. Stephen

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Gibson, and Dr. Ralph Reckley, Sr.; a magnificent corporate lawyer and benefactor in the late Attorney James H. Gilliam, Jr.; a nationally acclaimed singer in Maysa Leak; a great legal mind in Maryland Assistant Attorney General Turhan E. Robinson; a magnificent hospitality manager in Thompson Hospitality’s Roger Avery; and countless other Morgan graduates who attribute their love of language, literature and le mot juste and their passionate pursuit of excellence to the unmatched tutelage of Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey.

For some educators teaching is a job; it is what they do with their days. For others, it is a career; it is what they do with their lives. But for a few educators like Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey, teaching is a passion; it is an intense drive, an over-arching feeling and conviction about human development, their very reason for being. In the words of her appreciative students, Dr. Sheffey brought an uncontainable joy to the classroom, and it is almost as though, like Zora Neale Hurston, Dr. Sheffey had a rainbow round her shoulders that radiated her love of teaching and learning.

Dr. Sheffey’s devotion to teaching also manifested itself in program and curriculum development. As Chairperson of the Department of English in the seventies, in addition to maintaining the high standards of the writing program, Dr. Sheffey literally established a new and visionary trajectory for the Humanities Curriculum—already praised by the Middle States Association as a major component of the model liberal education program at Morgan—and aimed it clearly toward the twenty-first century, when, with the assistance of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she spearheaded a revision of the program to make it not only interdisciplinary, but also multicultural.

From the seventies to the recent past, the two required Humanities courses have reached beyond the traditionally-taught cultures of the Western World to impart an appreciation for peoples of other cultures, ways of life and artistic achievements, including the literature and arts of African Americans, Native Americans, Africans, cultures in the African Diaspora, Middle-Easterners and Asians. For the multicultural urban university that Morgan is today, this visionary program development left indelible impressions in asphalt on several generations of Morgan urban students, who are now more familiar with the global community than graduates of other institutions. The required two-volume textbook for those courses is dedicated to Dr. Sheffey for her foresight in developing the program.

In addition to being a superb companion in learning for her undergraduate and graduate students, Dr. Sheffey has been a pace-setting scholar. She was the Department’s expert on Shakespeare and conducted research on Shakespeare in London; Stratford, England; Stratford, Canada; and Stratford, Connecticut. A past President of the Maryland Chapter of the College English Association and the Langston Hughes Society, Founding President of the Zora Neale Hurston Society, a member of the Maryland Humanities Council for six years, a past chairperson of the Founding Board of Morgan’s WEAA-FM Radio Station, and a past member of the Board of Advanced Savings and Loan Association; she also attained status as a major authority on African-American and women’s literature and, over the years, has been an invited guest lecturer at Kentucky State University, Loyola University, New York University at Albany, then-Towson State University, University of Maryland— College Park, University of Maryland—Eastern Shore and University of Pennsylvania. She was a pioneer in the forefront of feminist scholarship in America, and she inspired and guided the world’s renewed appreciation for anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Having conducted research on Hurston in the Schomberg Collection at the New York Public Library, the MoorlandSpingarn Library at Howard University and the Library of Congress, Dr. Sheffey advanced to the

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cutting edge of Hurston scholarship by holding the first major national conference on Zora Neale Hurston, by publishing a collection of essays on Hurston, Rainbow Round My Shoulder: The Zora Neale Hurston Symposium Papers (Morgan State University Press, 1982), and by founding the Zora Neale Hurston Society two years later, in 1984. In 1986 she became the Founding Editor of the Zora Neale Hurston Forum, an annual which publishes scholarly essays on the life, writings, contemporaries and times of Hurston. Prior to her “Hurston Years,” Dr. Sheffey published a variety of scholarly pieces on British and African-American literature, and she co-edited, with her Morgan colleague Eugenia Collier, a reader for students, titled Impressions in Asphalt: Images of Urban America in Literature (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969). Later, in 1989, she published a collection of her own essays, Trajectory: Fueling the Future and Preserving the African-American Literary Past – Essays in Criticism (1962-1986) (Morgan State University Press, 1989).

Over the years, Morgan has come to know Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey not only for her outstanding teaching and scholarship and for her exceptional service to and support of the University—one whose generosity and beneficence have few equals and include generous donations to the Morgan Capital Campaign and leading the Morgan State University Press for more than 20 years—but also for her lofty ideals, her uncompromising academic principles, the warm and generous camaraderie which she has shared with colleagues and students for her professional lifetime, and her admirable and unmatched flourishes of rhetorical eloquence. In 1992-94 and 1994-95, Morgan awarded her the highly coveted Dr. Iva G. Jones Medallion Emblem, which goes to faculty members who have demonstrated excellence in teaching, research and service. In 1998, the Department of English and Language Arts established the Ruthe T. Sheffey Award for Scholarship, Service and Teaching in her honor and bestowed it upon her in 2000. In 1998, Dr. Sheffey was also inducted as a Charter Member of the Morgan State University Hall of Fame and was presented a diamond Hall of Fame watch in her honor in 2000. Later, in 2007, Morgan bestowed upon her the Outstanding Morgan Woman Award. She won two Dean’s Medals for Excellence as teacher and scholar, and, in August 2009, she won the Award for Outstanding Teaching from the Division of Academic Affairs. On June 17, 2010, Morgan dedicated the center Lecture Hall in the new $22 million Communications Center to Dr. Sheffey and honored her for being at the center of the intellectual life of Morgan for over sixty years.

In 2014, Dr. Sheffey went the second mile once again by endowing the Ruthe T. Sheffey Annual Lecture in African-American Female Studies. In 2017, President David Wilson appointed her Sesquicentennial Poet Laureate and charged her with writing the Sesquicentennial Poem for Morgan’s 150th anniversary celebration. Today we hold the Sixth Annual Ruthe T. Sheffey Lecture in AfricanAmerican Female Studies.

Burney J. Hollis, Ph.D. Retired Professor of English, Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts Member, MSU Board of Regents and Former Student of Dr. Sheffey

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DR. JOANNE VEAL GABBIN CLASS OF 1967 OF MORGAN STATE COLLEGE Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Professor of English

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THE SPEAKER

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R. JOANNE

VEAL GABBIN is the Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Professor of English at James Madison University. She is author of Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1985) and a children’s book, I Bet She Called Me Sugar Plum (2004). She is also the editor of The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999), Furious Flower: African American Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the Present (2004), Mourning Katrina: A Poetic Response to Tragedy (2009), Shaping Memories: Reflections of African American Women Writers (2009), Swaying in Wicked Grace: A Collection Commemorating 25 Years of Furious Flower (2019), and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2019), with co-editor Lauren K. Alleyne.

As executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, Gabbin has organized three international conferences for the critical exploration of African American poetry. The first, “Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry” held in 1994 with Gwendolyn Brooks, gathered 35 acclaimed poets to James Madison University in the first conference of its kind. The second, “Furious Flower: Regenerating the Black Poetic Tradition” brought together more than 50 nationally and internationally renowned poets in 2004 and was dedicated to two architects of the Black Arts Movement, Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. In September 2014, she organized the third conference, “Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry,” which was dedicated to Rita Dove and had more than sixty invited poets and scholars.

Since the establishment of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the first academic center devoted solely to Black poetry, she has guided the development of seminars, readings, collegiate summits, literary tributes, and the production of video anthologies and other educational material.

A dedicated teacher and scholar, she received her B.A. degree in English from Morgan State College in 1967 and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. At both universities, she counts among her academic blessings the opportunity to be mentored by such outstanding teachers as Drs. Ruthe T. Sheffey, Eugenia Collier, George Kent and John Hope Franklin. Her career includes teaching at Chicago State University, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and James Madison University in Virginia. She is the founder and organizer of the Wintergreen Women Writers’ Collective, and she is an inductee in the 2017 Class of the HistoryMakers.

She has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching, scholarship and leadership. Among them are the College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award for her book Sterling A. Brown, the James Madison University Faculty Women's Caucus and Women's Resource Network Award for Scholarship, the Outstanding Faculty Award, awarded by the Virginia State Council of Higher Education, the Provost Award for Excellence, the JMU Distinguished Faculty Award, induction in the International Literary Hall of Fame, the first professorship in the JMU Honors College named in her honor, and the Furious Flower Advisory Board Lifetime Achievement Award. In In September 2019, she presided over the 25th Anniversary of Furious Flower in Washington, DC hosted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

In 2021, she and her husband Alexander Gabbin were honored with the naming of a university building: Gabbin Hall. Members of the Class of ’67 joined her at the dedication ceremony held at

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JMU in September. Recently, Dr. Gabbin and Dr. Bethany Nowviskie, Dean of JMU Libraries, were the co-project investigators for a grant that has brought $2 million to JMU to develop a digital framework for the Furious Flower Archive and support its mission as a living poetry center.

CONFERENCE ON AFRICAN-AMERICAN POETRY

From “The Second Sermon on the Warpland” (1968) by Pulitzer-Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks

Taking its name from these lines in Brooks’ poem, Furious Flower is an academic center that originated in the acclaimed 1994 Furious Flower Poetry Conference, the first major conference on African American poetry since the 1970s. This event, envisioned and organized by distinguished scholar and professor Dr. Joanne Gabbin to honor Brooks and her literary legacy, was titled “Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry.” More than 30 presenters discussed the genre with an audience of hundreds of writers, scholars, and poetry enthusiasts. The conference garnered national attention, and The Washington Post called it a “historic gathering.”

After a second successful conference in 2004, Furious Flower was chartered as an academic center at JMU and acquired a dedicated facility and staff. Since then, it has continued to grow, developing and presenting programming and resources unavailable elsewhere.

LEFT: Gwendolyn Brooks speaks at the first Furious Flower Poetry Conference and RIGHT: Gwendolyn Brooks with Dr. Joanne Veal Gabbin, founder of the Conference, 1994

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Sixth Annual and Second Virtual RUTHE T. SHEFFEY LECTURE IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN FEMALE STUDIES PROGRAM Presiding Dr. Burney J. Hollis, ’68, Retired Professor of English and Dean Emeritus Member, MSU Board of Regents Welcome ..................................................................................................................................................

Anthem ........................................................................................................ “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” Morgan State University Choir, Virtual Performance Dr. Eric Conway, Conductor Greetings .................................................................................................... Dr. David Kwabena Wilson President

Dr. Jules White Acting Chairperson, Department of English and Language Arts Introduction of Benefactor .....................................................................................................................

Occasion ....................................................................................................... Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey, ’47 Professor of English Emerita Introduction of Speaker ..........................................................................................................................

Ruthe T. Sheffey Lecture in African-American Female Studies ............ Dr. Joanne Veal Gabbin, ‘67 Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Professor of English James Madison University “In Search of My Mother’s Garden:: Gwendolyn Brooks and Other Literary Mothers” Dialogue with the Audience ...................................................................................................................

Alma Mater .......................................................... Morgan State University Choir, Virtual Performance Closing .....................................................................................................................................................

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DR. RUTHE T. SHEFFEY NAMED SESQUICENTENNIAL POET LAUREATE

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n 2017, on the recommendation of the Sesquicentennial Celebration Coordinating Committee, President David Wilson appointed Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey as Poet Laureate of the Sesquicentennial Celebration and charged her with writing the Sesquicentennial Poem for Morgan’s 150th Anniversary Celebration.

Dr. Sheffey, Professor of English Emerita, is a 1947 graduate of Morgan State College and holds the record for being the longestcontinuously-serving faculty member in the history of Morgan.

She began teaching at Morgan in 1949 and retired in 2011, after sixty-two years of outstanding service. For several years, she was chair of the Department of English and, during that period, led the department in the revision of the Humanities courses to include a multicultural, global perspective.

Dr. Sheffey is the founder of the Zora Neale Hurston Society and the founding editor of the Zora Neale Hurston Forum, which has been published at Morgan since 1986.

She read the Sesquicentennial Poem at the December 2017 Commencement, which was the closing ceremony for the Sesquicentennial Celebration

Dr. David Kwabena Wilson President

Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey (‘47) Professor of English Emerita

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THE SESQUICENTENNIAL POEM

Prologue have utilized the rigor of the sonnet structure which encourages a poetic discipline worthy of celebrating Morgan State University’s one hundred fifty years’ arduous and illustrious journey. The three elements of our theme—purpose, progress and promise—are challenging meditations on the visions of those under whom I studied and served—Presidents Holmes, Jenkins, Cheek, Billingsley, Richardson, and Wilson.

Please view these stanzas as a modern riff, not only on past glories but on victories yet to come. Finally, the sonnet’s iambic pentameter form appropriately hymns Morgan State University’s meteoric rise to becoming declared a Carnegie-classified Research Institution and a National Treasure.

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Purpose A time came when God set the captives free.

When the dark night of ignorance had prevailed, The Methodists trained nine youths for the Ministry Who in God’s work of winning souls travailed.

Although the Jenkins’ goals held everywhere That what one thought, or wrote, or spoke was clear, These best and brightest students always knew That what each aspirant spoke was true.

In 1921 a new stone entrance proclaimed That the love, the joy of small and great Will always be at large acclaimed Of all who passed within this gate.

One-fifty years later in five stages created Morgan’s purpose, its progress, its promise validated.

Progress In “Ole Baltimore” where Countee Cullen walked, Where Morgan tried in vain to stretch its stone and brick sinews, Where later in those same streets Freddie Gray was stalked, The 70’s forces of retreat came sadly into view.

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With courage resisting both despair and defeat And valiantly always maintaining high worth And bravely resolving to never retreat, Morgan gave a true University birth.

All were urged to think of courage personally, The courage to stand and let oneself be heard, When all around you stand silently as trees.

When only the bravest Morganite was heard.

In later years, new self-empowered, human skin Made space for a great University to begin.

Promise

For over 150 years you have walked this Morgan mile, Over 150 dreams held like fragile eggshells in your hands.

Worn as shawls your moonlight and your sunrise, through your tears and through your smiles, You’ll bring them back as polished jewels to grace this hallowed land.

Sustained by your leaders, your teachers, your peers, Restrained by no inner fears of low worth You are the purpose, the progress, the promise of our future years And you are the hope to bring new glories to birth.

Taught respect for opponents amid deepest discord A compassionate discourse to seek, You are the hope as new rivers we ford And Morgan’s high standards we keep.

You were our promise from the very first start, Not only written on paper but etched on our hearts.

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A VILLANELLE IN PRAISE OF EARL S. RICHARDSON’S Remarkable Journey For this strong man the journey does not end The path, like Paul’s, found him an advocate.

He saw a challenge there, where the road bends.

Equity and parity in funding found a friend In speaking truth to power, stern, articulate.

For this wise man the journey does not end.

Like Odysseus, breasting Aegean seas, or Douglass, contending with the Chesapeake’s winds.

His vision was to build and renovate.

He loved the victories, there where the road bends.

A greater joy, distinguished graduates, the school’s life blood to send Out, in twenty-five years seems much too short a date.

For this just man the journey does not end.

A tireless leader whom even foes commend, New programs, structures, once done, more to anticipate He raised a monument there, where the road bends.

Firm on the threshing ground, where truth and honor blend A happy warrior clad in helmet, armor, and breastplate For this brave man, the journey does not end.

He seizes a new mission there, where the road bends.

Ruthe T. Sheffey, Ph.D. Professor of English Presented at the Faculty Institute Morgan State University August 12, 2009

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DEDICATION OF RUTHE T. SHEFFEY LECTURE HALL

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n Thursday, June 17, 2010, over two hundred guests gathered in the Communications Center for the official dedication of the Ruthe T. Sheffey Lecture Hall. The guests included her colleagues from the Department of English and Language Arts and from other departments and schools at the University; members of the Morgan administration; Dr. Sheffey’s former and current students; the pastor and members of her church congregation; friends from the community; and a number of members of her family. The event was a fitting tribute to one of Morgan’s finest graduates and one of its finest and most distinguished professors, one who, in her professional lifetime, became a Morgan Legend. According to then-Dean Burney J. Hollis, who presided at the dedication, the ceremony raised Dr. Sheffey from synonym to eponym for academic excellence at Morgan over her sixty years (by 2010).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Ms. Stacey Benn Executive Administrative Assistant to Chief of Staff, Finance and Management Dr. Burney J. Hollis Retired Professor of English and Dean Emeritus, James H. Gilliam, Jr., College of Liberal Arts Member, MSU Board of Regents

Ms. Donna J. Howard Vice President for Institutional Advancement Mr. Larry Jones Assistant Vice President for Public Relations and Strategic Communications Ms. Sherrye Larkins Special Events and Projects Coordinator, Institutional Advancement Dr. Ruthe T. Sheffey Professor of English Emerita Dr. J. A. White Acting Chair, Department of English and Language Arts

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IN

RUTHE T. SHEFFEY L E CTU R E A FR I CAN -A ME R I CAN F E MA L E S TU DI E S