Tom Dent's role in the organizational mentoring of African American Southern writers: a memoir

African American Review, Summer, 2006 by Quo Vadis Gex Breaux

Thomas Covington Dent left a legacy larger than his published works. He left a legacy of caring, nurturing, passionate involvement in the grooming of writers and the organizations that support them. His work with the Umbra Workshop in the New York of the early 1960s, his efforts to sustain the Free Southern Theatre (FST) writing workshop that became Blkartsouth in the late sixties and seventies, and his Herculean efforts to keep a group of Black writers workshopping in New Orleans through the Congo Square Writers' Union in the 1980s all speak to a passion he expressed best in the closing lines of the preface to his first book of poetry, Magnolia Street. Invoking both his mentor and friend, South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, and his own passion for writing, Tom wrote, "Maybe someday I can pass on to someone else struggling to gain confidence in this passionate work something of what Kgositsile has bequeathed to me" (Preface). As peers, proteges, and friends readily attest, Tom succeeded in sharing his passion and bolstered many a floundering confidence.

"He was the bourbon among us," Ishmael Reed, a former Umbra member, told me as we commiserated over our loss late in the summer of 1998. We talked about Tom's uncanny way of handling people and situations and the New York Umbra group: "We met at Tom Dent's apartment and often the meetings would turn into free-for-alls. We were very sensitive to criticism and one could always feel the ego power sizzling in the room like a downed electrical wire. Dangerous. Among our members were those who would go on to establish international reputations" (20 July 1998). Included were Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, N. H. Pritchard, Askia Toure, Charles and Raymond Patterson.

Reed's memories place Tom at the center of sane and sound handling of these fiery gatherings. He also elaborated on his bourbon comment: "I didn't know at the time, that Dent was a product of the African-American aristocracy, and he never let on about his origins" (3 Dec. 2001). The Black Collegian Online echoes Reed's observations about Tom's background, "Tom's father was president of Dillard University and Tom was groomed to become a major figure in the Black professional world" (par. 2). His mother, long before the feminist movement or the civil rights movement, was a concert pianist. Tom's family believed in service to the community, to the race. It was clear that they never quite expected their "how to conduct a worthy life" lessons to manifest in the organization of an arts movement widely associated with the radical thinking and behavior of the Black Power movement. About Tom, we in the New Orleans Congo Square crowd would occasionally wonder how anyone could seem so regal and yet be unfalteringly earthbound at the same time. How could anyone do so much while seeming to do so little, without undue external frenzy? Sometimes enigmatic friend and mentor, he was poet, writer, journalist, administrator, PR man, producer, community organizer, raconteur extraordinaire, and to many, just "Tom."

When hundreds of people came for his funeral services, from near and

as far away as Africa via New York, his brother commented, "It's like he was famous or something." We were always convinced that if he were not, he was one of the few people we knew whose work deserved fame. He was only 66 at his death. His mother, over 90 then, was inconsolable. Since Tom's death we have had time to review his life's work, his expressed intentions, and many actual outcomes.

Tom taught by example. For many of us he was the only person we knew actually living the "writing life." He devoted hours to discussion, analysis, and the importance of precision in intention. Reed outlined a system of beliefs that defined Umbra: "Umbra changed all of us and I think that if one person was the spearhead behind the whole thing, it was Tom. One thing all of us in Umbra shared was contempt for the middle class. We were antimaterialistic. When we broke up, we went our separate ways and what we took with us was a spirit of cultural revolt that influenced later movements, Black Power, feminism and multiculturalism" (3 Dec. 2001). With firmly held beliefs about class, culture, and the importance of art to social movement, Tom returned home to New Orleans in 1965, and here made his stand, not always vociferously, for both the writer and the literature of the South. Tom told me once that he never intended to stay in New Orleans; he planned to come down here, start a workshop like Umbra and return to New York. But the culture, the people, the Mississippi River, and finally the endless possibilities of the place, mesmerized him.

He worked with John O'Neal and Gilbert Moses to create and manage the Free Southern Theatre (FST). They believed in the importance of living Black Community Theatre. This effort was a cultural response to the growing interest in identity issues, as artistic backlash to the integration movement that flowed out of the Civil Rights Movement. In the late 60s and early 70s, FST underwent numerous philosophical changes, all of them far left of center. There was a period of Marxism that proved particularly trying for members more concerned with performance than ideology. It was during those years that Tom's level-headedness proved most valuable to the organization according to Kalamu ya Salaam, who thought Tom's role as mediator in organizations "allowed many of the organizations to last longer than they would have without him." He was able to work with people in the midst of divergent agendas. Kalamu thought Tom's ability to reason with people was the glue that held loosely structured organizations together through times that might have effected their undoing.