Fall 2008

Voices

 

 

In This Issue:

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 Professor Melbourne S. Cummings,

Howard University, is the 2008

Francine Merritt Award recipient.

 

Mel Cummings Wins 2008

Francine Merritt Award for

Outstanding Contributions to

the Lives of Women in Communication

Please join Voices in celebrating Dr. Melbourne “Mel” S. Cummings of Howard University as the 2008 Francine Merritt Award recipient for outstanding contributions to the lives of women in communication.

Cummings has witnessed NCA transform itself more than once since 1973 when she attended her first convention of what was then the recently renamed Speech Communication Association. A founding member of the Black Caucus and a former SCA Affirmative Action Officer, she has been personally involved in the struggle to transform the association into a more inclusive home for communication scholars.	Join Us at the Reception! 2008 Francine Merritt Award & 2008 Bonnie Ritter Book Award Saturday, Nov.22, 5-6:30 p.m. Salvatore’s Cucina Italiana Restaurant 750 Front St.

She says, “NCA looks and feels a lot different in 2008 than it did in 1973.”

In 35 years of association membership, she has attended 34 annual conventions. But she still recalls her 1973 convention experience as painful. “I was completely lost,” she said. “I went to sessions that seemed interesting, but I saw no one of color, initially, and not a single white person spoke to me or smiled in my direction.”

Things improved the next day when she was invited to attend a meeting with Molefi Asante, Jack Daniel, Lyndrey Niles, Orlando Taylor, Caroline Calloway Thomas, Dorothy Pennington, and Lucia Hawthorne, who were already discussing the creation of what would become the Black Caucus.

“I learned that they had begun to meet together in 1969 after some of them were called racial slurs and actually physically threatened,” Cummings said.

She became the group’s newsletter editor.

Cummings also has always been a friend of the Women’s Caucus. Anita Taylor credits Cummings with inspiring the WC’s formation and said Cummings should have won the Merritt Award a long time ago. The WC’s founders “went to school” on Cummings’ work with the Black Caucus and her challenges to the association.

“In those days, many of us worked to destabilize the ruling hierarchy of good old boys who had run the organization,” Taylor said. “The first group organized to bring about such change was the Black Caucus.”

Cummings said, “The Black Caucus and the Women’s Caucus actually started out supporting each other.” Both groups added their names to each other’s membership “to make sure we had the appropriate numbers to achieve our goals.”

Although the two caucuses never had a formal coalition, “there was also never true separation,” she said. She wishes the caucuses would return to their more cooperative roots by communicating with each other more. 

Cummings said that the year she confronted SCA leadership about its poor record on diversity, “the Affirmative Action Council, especially Anita Taylor, physically went with me and stood in support.” That incident directly precipitated the nomination of Carolyn Calloway Thomas as SCA’s first black candidate for vice president—but not without controversy.

After daring to say that the association continued to practice racism openly, Cummings was given one hour to find two “qualified” minorities as potential vice presidential nominations. She said the catch was presenting the candidates’ CVs to prove their worthiness.

Cummings said, “For me, this example was a bitter/sweet moment, for it proved that even among our intellectual and social peers, we still had to ‘prove’ our worth, our ability, and our qualifications to serve in our own discipline’s organization.”

In addition to Cummings’ courageous NCA leadership on behalf of what used to be called “affected groups,” including blacks, women, and GLTBQ members, her Merritt Award also pays tribute to her record of mentoring.

Taylor says that Cummings “has brought more young women of color into active professional participation than any single individual I know.”

Carolyn Byerly, a Howard colleague, said, “While Dr. Cummings has worked long and tirelessly for all her students in her decades at Howard University, the fact that the vast majority of Howard’s communication graduate students are African-American females means that she has made a very deep and lasting contribution to minority women’s advancement in our field.”

Cummings has mentored hundreds of undergraduate and graduate student women, according to Brenda Allen, one of Cummings’ former doctoral students. Cummings chaired Allen’s dissertation committee.

Allen says that Cummings’ “generous, selfless, and unswerving mentoring has facilitated academic success for innumerable scholars, especial African-American women.”

Cummings says her proudest moments have been watching her “students leave the university with their Ph.D. degrees in hand, ready to conquer a waiting academic life.”

“Mentoring, I think, has to do with consistency, with being available to students, with encouraging them, with offering support, with showing interest and concern in not only their academic lives but also their personal lives,” she said. “We must support students academically, financially, and personally.  Though they are adults, sometimes they feel vulnerable and need someone to listen to them, to allow them to vent, to cry, to help them work through frustrations.”

Cummings says that her mentoring commitment is the result of her upbringing. “What I noticed about people in my hometown is that when people showed potential to succeed, they were nurtured in such a way that they always succeeded.  In most instances, when they set their sights on what to do with their lives, then the community seemed to come together to make it a reality.”

“I came to mentoring naturally,” she said. “I do what my small community did for me and for countless others. I know no other way to conduct myself than to help a student, female or male, to reach her or his potential.”

NCA previously honored Cummings with the Mentor Award, the Robert J. Kibler Memorial Award, and the Black Caucus’ Distinguished Service Award. The National Council of Negro Women named her its 2007 Distinguished Educator. She also served as the founding associate editor of the Howard Journal of Communication.

On learning that Allen nominated her for the Merritt Award, Cummings said she “felt extremely honored and privileged.”

“I also am grateful to have been supported for such a prestigious award by my students Cerise Glenn and Rachel Droogsma (whose groundbreaking research on women you will hear about very soon) as well as my colleagues Carolyn Byerly and Anita Taylor. I thank all of them for this singular honor.”

 

Last Updated 22 October 2008  

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