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J. Saunders Redding

J. Saunders Redding, a Black man with a mustache, rests his chin on his left fist and looks into the camera. He is wearing a suit, collared shirt, and striped tie.
FBI Files on J. Saunders Redding
Redding, J. Saunders
FBI documents studying J. Saunders Redding.
Click to Read FBI Files
Remembered as the first African American to hold a faculty position at an Ivy League university, J. Saunders Redding (1906-1988) first made his name as a historian, novelist, literary critic, and distinguished English professor at Morehouse, Hampton, and other historically black colleges. He wrote widely in several genres over five decades, publishing To Make a Poet Black (1939), a groundbreaking study of African American literature in its social context; No Day of Triumph (1944), a midlife memoir of his southern origins; Stranger and Alone (1950), a novel of mixed-race identity and black higher education; and Cavalcade (1970), an inclusive anthology of African American literature co-edited by Arthur P. Davis. They Came in Chains (1950) cast a critical eye on black nationalism. The FBI cast a critical eye on what it considered the dangerous emotionalism of Redding’s writing and watched him closely from 1953 to 1968.
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