Lorenzo Dow Turner was the first African American to earn a PhD in English at the University of Chicago.
Born in 1895 in North Carolina, he earned a BA from Howard in 1914 and an MA in English from Harvard in 1917. He immediately began teaching at Howard, serving as the chair of the Department of English from 1917 to 1928, while also working toward his PhD at the University of Chicago. Writing a dissertation on anti-slavery sentiment in American language prior to 1865, he earned his PhD in 1926.
Shortly after completing his doctorate, Turner moved from Howard to Fisk University, where he remained as chair of the Department of English until 1946.
The major publication of his scholarly career was Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (University of Chicago Press, 1949). A linguist, Turner’s project in this book was to unearth the African origins of an African American dialect that previous scholars had taken to be simply “bad English.” His research work for the project took him to the Sea Islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia (1932-33), Brazil (1940-41), London (1936-37), and Paris (1937). The book continues to be valuable to scholars today.
At Fisk, Turner designed one of the first programs in African Studies and in 1946 he took up a position at Roosevelt University in Chicago as Chairman of a new African Studies Program. Turner retired from Roosevelt in 1970 and died in 1972.
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This set of three memos shows an interesting progression in how the press editors describe Turner. In the first memo he is “a Negro Ph.D. from Chicago.” In the second memo he is described in the first paragraph as having taken “his degree here in English many years ago” and only in the second paragraph as “being himself colored.” Finally, in the third memo he is simply “a Ph.D. in English from the U. of C.” and there is no mention of Turner’s own race. In other words, over the course of the Press’s consideration of Turner’s scholarly work, Turner evolves from being a “Negro Ph.D.” to being instead, a Ph.D. who has produced “a scholarly and prolonged investigation” into the Gullah dialect. |
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5. Mitford M. Matthews, memo to University of Chicago Press staff, about the manuscript of Lorenzo Dow Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, October 31, 1946. University of Chicago Press Records. |
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6. Mitford M. Matthews, memo to R.D. Hemens, about Turner’s Gullah project, August 26, 1946. University of Chicago Press Records. |
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7. Rollin D. Hemens, memo to University of Chicago Press staff member William Terry Couch about the manuscript of Lorenzo Dow Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect, August 19, 1946. University of Chicago Press Records. |
