"Eva Beatrice Dykes" (August 13,1893-October 29 1986)

Scholar and educator,was born in Washington,D.C. the daughter of James Stanlry Dykes and Martha Ann Howard.Eva graduated from M Street High (later Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School) in 1910.As valedictorian of her class,she won a &10 scholarship from Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority to attend Howard University,where in 1914 she graduated summa cum laude with a BA in English After a year of teaching Latin and English at the now defunct Walden University in Nasville,Tennessee,and for another year elsewhere,she was urged by James Howard,a physician and uncle on her mother's side,to enter Radcliff College in 1916.Subsequently,she earned a second BA in Enlish,magna cum laude,in 1917.Elected Phi Beta Kappa,she received an MA in English in 1918 and PhD in English philology in 1921.Her dissertation was titled "Pope and His Influence in America from 1715 to 1850."From 1921-1929 the apex of the New Negro movement-Eva taught at Dunbar High School and later at Howard University (1929-1944),which she joined initially as associate professor of English.In 1944,following a conversation to the Seventh Day Adventist church,she joined the faculty at Oakwood College, a school of the faith in Hunstsville,Alabama.By 1946 she had become head of the Department of English.Although she officially retired in 1968,she remained active with college until 1975 and continued to to live on the grounds until her death.In 1931 Eva,along with Otellia Cromwell and Orenzo Dow Turner,brought out Readings,from Negro Authors for High Schools and Colleges.Over a decade later,she published her landmark work,The Negro in English Romantic Through (1942).Between November 1942 & July 1944 Eva authored more than a half dozens essays-in journals as varied as Crusader, Journal,of Negro History,and Negro History Buelletin-about the poetry of the Civil War,the destiny of blacks in higher education,the fate of black publishers,the the triumphs of the black professional, and the persistent tone of American romanticism.Eva's pioneering work,The Negro in English Romantic Thought;or, A study of Sympathy for the Oppressed,examines references to the figure of the black in English literature of the eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries.Her goals in the work were to determine whether there was "any sympathetic attitude toward the Negro and second,to find out reasons for this attitude."She aaserts in the work that slavery was immoral as well as financially ineffective.In part she subconsciously ventriloquizes an African American voice of racial protest through old British texts.Eva also notes the painful separation of families under of families under the slave system.Most significantly,Eva challenges the acceptance by so many romantic writers-including woman-of the view that black people are less than human.She traces the orgins of slavery to the Elizabethan age,whose own monarch occasionally doubted the moral authority of the doctrine.Pleased to rediscover that the romancer Apra Behn had praised a "noble chieftain" (Oroonoko or the Royal Slave [1688]), Eva probably winced to see Lady Mary Wortley Montague write countess of Bristol on April 10,1718,"I know you'll expect I should say something particular of the slaves;and you