Turner, Darwin T. (1931–1989)
An educator, humanitarian, literary scholar, editor,
and critic, Darwin T. Turner was born in Cincin-
nati, Ohio. A child prodigy, he received a B.A. de-
gree at age 16 from the University of Cincinnati in
1947 and an M.A. from the same institution two
years later, in 1949. He achieved a Ph.D. degree
from the University of Chicago in 1956, by age 25.
His degrees were in English and American dra-
matic literature. Turner began his teaching career
at Clark College in Atlanta, Morgan State College
in Maryland, and Florida A&M, all HISTORICALLY
BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES (HBCUs). At yet
another HBCU, North Carolina A&T University,
Turner became the first chair of the department of
English and subsequently the dean of the gradu-
ate school. He ended his academic career at the
University of Iowa, where, as professor of English
and director of African-American studies for al-
most two decades, he led one of the first seriously
committed and academically sound and respected
programs in African-American studies in the
United States, mentoring graduate students who
were successfully placed as beginning junior pro-
fessors at major mainstream institutions. Turner
was at the helm of this program when it morphed
into the African-African American World Studies
Program, a graduate degree–granting program as-
sociated with the University of Iowa’s American
Studies Program.
At the beginning and throughout most of his
career as a scholar and critic of African-American
literature, Turner voiced his concerns about the
paucity of black literary scholars directly involved
in creating a cadre of scholarship on black litera-
ture. He did so, for example, in his now-classic
essay “Afro-American Literary Critics: An Intro-
duction,” in which he wrote, “even in this decade
of discovery of black culture, Afro-American crit-
ics remain blackly invisible” (59). Ironically, the
role had been left, for the most part, to white crit-
ics such as Robert Bone, whose The Negro Novel
in America (1952) many considered the definitive
text on this subject for several decades, despite
the pioneering work of Benjamin Brawley, ALAIN
LOCKE, Hugh Gloster, and SAUNDERS REDDINGS.
Turner further lamented, “The fact is ironic and
regrettable, since black American critics can offer
insights into the language, styles and meanings
intended by black writers, insights infrequently
denied to those who have not shared the experi-
ence of living as black people in the United States
of America” (60).
A prolific scholar, editor and compiler, Turner
did his part to change the critical landscape. In a
Minor Chord: Three African American Writers and
Their Search for Identity (1971), a study of the lives
and works of ZORA NEALE HURSTON, JEAN TOOMER,
and COUNTEE CULLEN, is Turner’s best-known and
somewhat controversial text. He edited the Norton
authoritative edition of Toomer’s Cane and com-
piled The Wayward and the Seeking: Collection of
Writings by Jean Toomer (1980). He compiled his
three separately published anthologies—Black
American Literature: Essays (1969), Black Ameri-
can Literature: Poetry (1969) and Black American
Literature: Fiction (1969)—into a single anthol-
og y, BLACK AMERICAN LITERATURE: Essays, Poetry,
Fiction, Drama (1970), which became central to
the study of African-American literature on col-
lege campuses across the United States during the
1970s and 1980s. In 1971, the editors of Blacks in
America, Bibliographic Essays noted that Turner’s
Afro-American Writers (1970) was “the best and
most comprehensive bibliography listing works by
and about Black American writers” (McPherson et
al., 6). Similar accolades were heaped on his an-
thology of African-American plays, Black Drama
in America (1971).
By the time of his death in 1991, Turner had
witnessed the emergence of a new generation of
young African-American scholars, including BAR-
BARA CHRISTIAN, Hortense Spillers, Trudier Har-
ris, Karla F. C. Holloway, Bernard Bell, Deborah
McDowell, HOUSTON A. BAKER, JR., and HENRY L.
GATES JR., who set out to verify the complexity of
the African-American literary tradition and define
new directions in African-American literary criti-
cism, fulfilling Turner’s dreams and wishes by the
end of the 20th century.
In 1976 the University of Cincinnati estab-
lished the Darwin T. Turner Scholars Program andTurner, Darwin T. 511