Melvin Tolson Info

For a basic overview of Tolson's life and career, check out the biography on the Melvin Tolson Foundation's web site. You could also watch the movie The Great Debaters (2007) to see Denzel Washington as Tolson.  (Oprah co-produced the film; Suzan-Lori Parks helped write it; Forest Whitaker's also in it.)

Here are some places to go to learn more about the poetry:

• Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry (2010) -- also contains a chapter on Bunting.
• Gary Lenhart, The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class (2006).
• Keith Leonard, Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (2006).
• Kathy Lou Schultz, “To Save and Destroy: Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Theories of the Archive,” Contemporary Literature Vol. 52 No. 1 (Spring 2011).

For an introduction to Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), go to Google Books and read as much of the following as it will permit you:

• Hermine Pinson, "African/American Transformations in Melvin B. Tolson's Libretto," in Black Liberation in the Americans, eds. Fritz Gysin and Christopher Mulvey (Hamburg: LIT, 2001): 175-90.

Pinson is good for the basics re: the poem itself, but be aware that the history of Liberia and its relations with the United States and its African neighbors are much more complex (and much less utopian) than this essay acknowledges. Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of his time in Liberia as a news correspondent in The Shadow of the Sun (2001) would make a good pairing with Pinson. I'll see if I can find a good historical source to give you.