Eva Beatrice Dykes

A Family Tradition

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 attended Howard until illness forced her to end her studies.

Dykes earned her bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in 1914, months before the start of World War I, a conflict that would help spark the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, as Black soldiers returned home primed to fight for racial equality.

Following a year spent teaching English and Latin at Walden University in Nashville, Tennessee, Dykes applied to Radcliffe to pursue a master’s degree. Like other historically Black colleges and universities, Howard was not nationally accredited, a function of limited resources and racist policies. So, like W. E. B. Du Bois when he entered Harvard, Dykes was forced to earn a second bachelor’s degree before she was allowed to begin graduate studies.

Dykes explained in an interview as part of the Black Women Oral History Project conducted at Radcliffe in the 1970s: “The registrar wrote back and said I would have to attend Radcliffe so that they could determine what type of work I would do. So, my uncle decided to have me go there as an unclassified student and also get another AB from a school that was accredited at that time. [And] after I had been there one year, I was classified as a senior.” She earned a Radcliffe AB, magna cum laude, with concentrations in English, Latin, German, and Greek, in 1917 and completed her AM the following year. 

High Expectations

Dykes was fortunate to not have to worry about funding for her studies, thanks to Radcliffe scholarships and the support of her uncle, Dr. James Howard, who "made a deep sacrifice himself to send [Dykes] through school.” Howard provided crucial encouragement, urging Dykes to pursue advanced degrees, and also supported her musical interests.

Little is known about Dykes's experience as a woman of color at Radcliffe, where she was not allowed to live in a dormitory because of her race. In a 1928 Radcliffe alumnae survey, Dykes, who had become a devoted Seventh Day Adventist, noted that given the choice about where to go to college again, she would have chosen one affiliated with her faith.

While she almost certainly experienced the discrimination and isolation that other early Black students describe, Dykes's Cambridge years also provided a welcome respite from the more pervasive racism and Jim Crow segregation she faced at home in the South. In the same oral history interview, Dykes described how segregation forced her to conduct her doctoral research only in northern states, including at historical societies in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. “My teacher wanted me to go to North Carolina, but I couldn’t go, because I was Black,” she told the interviewer. “So, I couldn’t attend the historical society there ... But on the other hand, I was able to get through without meeting prejudice.”

Dykes devoted her decades-long career to teaching, first at Dunbar High School and then at Howard, where she taught English from 1929 to 1944 and was voted the best all-round teacher by the College of Liberal Arts faculty. Spurred on by her faith, she moved in 1944 to the Adventist-affiliated Oakwood College (now Oakwood University) in Huntsville, Alabama, where she taught until her retirement in 1968, and again from 1970 to 1975.

Molding Minds

Dykes was the institution’s first faculty member to hold a PhD. She also served as chair of the English Department and the Division of Humanities and played a pivotal role in helping Oakwood secure accreditation in 1958.

Also an accomplished musician—by the age of seven she had become an organist at local churches, even though her feet barely reached the pedals—Dykes founded the world-renowned choir the Aeolians of Oakwood University, recognized today 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 after Dykes as a tribute to her service to the institution and countless contributions to the lives of blacks students, staff, and faculty.

Affirmation

Much of Dykes's scholarship focused on what celebrated figures in 18th- and 19th-century English literature thought about race and slavery. In part, she sought to expose “the variety of ways in which that cancer of American life, race prejudice, is eating the spiritual bowels of American morale and undermining the progress of the United States as a nation—prejudice in labor, in education, in journalism, in the artistic world, in the courts of justice, in the church and in society in general.” But she was also committed to elevating the prose, poetry, and song of Black creators, which she hoped would inspire young African Americans.

Dykes reflected on her decision to study and teach English in a 1968 interview with the Huntsville Times: “When looked at quickly, literature doesn’t seem to stand up as a very practical subject,” she said. “Certainly, one doesn’t construct a building with a degree in English, but literature helps a people’s spirit and helps preserve the language. It can be very practical, too—I know it can change a reader’s attitude and possibly even alter his behavior.”

Sources

“Eva Dykes, Transcript,” Interviews of the Black Women Oral History Project, 1976–1981, OH-31; T-32, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:RAD.SCHL:10041689.

Eva Beatrice Dykes, “Democracy and Walt Whitman,” Negro History Bulletin 6, no. 8 (May 1, 1943): 175. 

Eva B. Dykes, “Philip Henry Lotz, Rising Above Color,” The Journal of Negro History 29, no. 2 (April 1944): 223–224. 

Virgil Christianson, “Much Yet to Learn–Pioneering Teacher Retires,” The Huntsville Times (Alabama), August 15, 1968.

DeWitt S. Williams, “Eva Beatrice Dykes: First African American Woman to Complete PHD Requirements,” Spectrum, December 10, 2019, https://spectrummagazine.org/news/2018/eva-beatrice-dykes-first-african-american-woman-complete-phd-requirements.