Eva B. Dykes

Eva Beatrice Dykes, a Washington, DC, native, was not new to the world of scholarship when she arrived at Radcliffe College. She was part of the second generation of her family to attend Howard University — her father, three uncles, and sister were all graduates of the eminent historically Black institution. Dykes’s mother also studied at Howard until illness forced her to withdraw.

Dykes earned her bachelor’s degree from Howard University, summa cum laude, in 1914.

After leaving Radcliffe, Dykes devoted her decades-long career to teaching, first returning home to Washington, DC, and accepting posts at the segregated Dunbar High School and later at her alma mater Howard University. She taught English at Howard from 1929 to 1944, where she was voted the best all-round teacher by the College of Liberal Arts faculty.

Music also played a large role in her life. An accomplished musician, she had been an organist at local churches as early as age 7, even though her feet barely reached the pedals. She was also a composer, and in 1926, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life — a leading publication of the Harlem Renaissance — honored two of her compositions: “Lady O’ Mine” and “To the Black Beloved.” Throughout her adult life Dykes was a celebrated accompanist, and often contributed her musical talents to local philanthropic and educational causes.

Dykes was a scholar of English and Black literature. Her early scholarship focused on how celebrated figures in 18th- and 19th-century English literature thought about race and slavery. In her work, she sought to expose racial prejudice as an impediment to the nation moving spiritually, morally, and economically forward.

Dykes was also committed to elevating the prose, poetry, and song of Black creators, which she hoped would inspire young Black people. In 1931, she co-edited a survey of early Black literature with Otelia Cromwell and Lorenzo Dow Turner, a textbook designed to bring writing by Black authors into American classrooms.

Spurred on by her faith, in 1944, Dykes joined the faculty of the Seventh-day Adventist-affiliated historically Black Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Alabama, where she taught until her retirement in 1968, and again from 1970 to 1975.

Dykes was the institution’s first faculty member to hold a Ph.D. She served as chair of the English Department and the Division of Humanities and a played pivotal role in helping Oakwood secure accreditation in 1958. She also used her musical talents in support of the school and its students, founding the world-renowned choir the Aeolians of Oakwood University. Today the group is recognized as “an authoritative exponent of Negro spirituals and Work songs which express the yearnings of their forefathers to be free.”

In 1973, Oakwood renamed its library for Dykes in tribute to her service to the institution and countless other contributions to the lives of Black students, staff, and scholars. She died in 1986 and is buried in Huntsville, near the Oakwood campus.