Originally published on May 25, 2016

“I believed that African-American lives had not been adequately described or authenticated in books or films, and I wanted to use the tool of biography to go at least a little way toward remedying the situation.”

This is Professor Arnold Rampersad, who has authored many biographies about influential African Americans, taught at universities such as Princeton, Harvard and Stanford, and received the National Humanities Award from President Barack Obama.

“I believed that African-American lives had not been adequately described or authenticated in books or films, and I wanted to use the tool of biography to go at least a little way toward remedying the situation.”

Rampersad came to the school’s auditorium on March 23 to give a presentation on his work, including biographies on novelist Ralph Ellison and poet Langston Hughes.

English teacher Nicole Henares invited Prof. Rampersad to Lowell especially because his work relates to the AP English Language class curriculum, which includes books about racial issues such as Invisible Man. The novel follows an African American man living in the mid 20th century as he struggles with both his personal identity and the social prejudice that makes him invisible to the rest of the world. “For the AP classes, they study Ralph Ellison in depth, and he is the biographer of Ellison,” Henares said.

Henares also considers Rampersad to be one of the greatest literary critics, and said she wanted to invite him to the school to show students what it means to be an academic and literary scholar. “He is foremost a scholar of… African-American literature, and he’ll give us what it means to be an academic and literary scholar,” Henares said. “That’s something we don’t really talk about in our English classes, particularly AP classes.”

Teachers found that Rampersad’s perspective on Langston Hughes, who is famous for poems such as “Harlem,” was informative. “Rampersad did a nice job of setting up a literary and historical background for Langston Hughes’s work,” English teacher Sydney Recht said. “The depth and breadth of his knowledge about Hughes was evident.”

Many students also found the presentation enlightening. “He discussed other writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, and how these writers influenced Hughes’s work,” senior Riki Eijima said. “I have always enjoyed reading Hughes’s work so it was neat to learn that he wrote plays and two autobiographies.”

For other students, Rampersad’s presentation offered a fresh view on Langston Hughes. “Usually I learn about the works [of an author], but not in conjunction with the author’s history,” senior Miranda Lee said. “Rather than seeing, say, Hughes’s poem as an assignment to interpret, I can now also see his poem as a reflection of his time and liberal ideals.”

Rampersad has also written books on baseball player Jackie Robinson and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. “I wanted to combine minute details of people’s lives with the larger picture to get closer to the truth of the way blacks actually lived,” Rampersad said about his work as a whole.

“I wanted to combine minute details of people’s lives with the larger picture to get closer to the truth of the way blacks actually lived.”

One of Prof. Rampersad’s achievements was editing Langston Hughes’s poetry into the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. He found that hunting down Hughes’s original poems and their publication dates were especially challenging. “[The collection is]not perfect but it forms the basis for the scholarly as well as private and personal appreciation of Hughes as a poet,” Rampersad said.

Although Rampersad is now retired, he taught at Stanford for almost 20 years. When he taught, Professor Rampersad preferred to let his students decide what was right and what was wrong. “When I was a teacher, I generally avoided mixing up what was in the news of the day with what was happening in novels and poems from the past,” Prof. Rampersad said. “I taught the books and then relied on my students to make the connections, which of course were always there in their faces.”

Now that Prof. Rampersad is retired from teaching, he makes guest appearances at places like Lowell where he can elaborate more on his work, especially its significance in understanding African-American issues. “The main thing is to read American History systematically and honestly, to know about events such as slavery and the Civil War, racial segregation, legal and constitutional history, [and] the tradition of exclusion aimed systematically at blacks and other minorities,” Rampersad said.