Annetta B. Gomez-Jefferson. The Sage of Tawawa: Reverdy Cassius Ransom, 1861-1959.

Kent: Kent State UP, 2002. 325 pp. $42.00.

Author of four biographical sketches of women in the theater in her Black Women in America and the biography of Joseph Gomez, a bishop in the African-American Methodist Church, Gomez-Jefferson, retired professor of English and theater at Wooster College, is a good authority on the preacher Reverdy Ransom. Because of his association with the Wilberforce community, in which I happen to have been teaching for some thirty-seven years, I was glad to hear of her book-signing recently in the Afro-American Museum there and went with colleagues to hear her talk. The separation of the two universities in Wilberforce--the one named after the locale, basically religious in nature, and the other an arm of the "state"--relates to Ransom's being present during the concern with this dichotomy. Notably he saw the Christian church as solving the issue of race, his philosophy being "as God is above men, so men should be above the idea of race"; this reminds me personally of Central State University's periodical some time ago, The Journal of Human Relations, for which I happened to be Book Review Editor shortly after I arrived; it steadily maintained that there is only one race, the human race.

This complicated, long-drawn-out biography introduces features of special interest to me, for example Ransom's support of Paul Laurence Dunbar and the black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (evidently at least a nominal take-off on the name of a well-known Romantic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge). When I came to Wilberforce some years ago from teaching at the University of New Mexico, I had heard in advance from a colleague that the Wilberforce community was linked originally also with William Dean Howells, an assiduous novelist who started a communitarian locale nearby in Sugarcreek (the remains of which I then investigated); Howells reviewed Dunbar's work and thus notably assisted him in achieving considerable status. The Dunbar connection with Ransom helps out too now, though he disagreed with Howells's stress on Dunbar's "dialect poems."

Much of the book deals with religion, the A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) church, and how ministers "bought Tawawa Springs, a health resort near Xenia" (thus leading to the main title of this book). The association with blacks originally had to do with the rumor that the community was for children that slaveowners had had with their slaves. Gomez-Jefferson comments on a change in this policy: "The slaveholders could no longer afford to send their mulatto children north, nor could the church provide scholarships for free blacks." Much deals with this status when Ransom entered Wilberforce in 1881, at which time "there were about 130 students" (see his book School Days at Wilberforce).

Ransom switched for a year to Oberlin College, but, owing to criticism, he returned to Wilberforce, where he then graduated in 1886. His love for Nature is also brought neatly into the scene. He was working in Springfield, where he was "appointed to a church" in 1890. Because I have been living in Springfield since the 1974 tornado, when my Central State apartment was demolished, I was enlightened to read that there were "3,549 blacks" in the city then (11.1% of the total population). W. E. B. Du Bois called Ransom a "literary genius." Ransom also became involved with Payne Seminary in our area.

The book is also enlightening in a number of other respects, for example in its reference to Miss Hallie Q. Brown, after whom the Central State library was then named, as Ransom's "former teacher at Wilberforce." Ransom's wife Emma also enters the picture, speaking, for instance, "at a benefit for the Harriet Tubman home."

There is much reference to Ransom's editorship of the Review, as if looking forward to the African American Review in a sense. Of special concern to me is Ransom's applause for Mahatma Ghandi, especially since a well-known colleague of mine at CSU, Om Dixit, had also related Ghandi to black culture and in print (the reflection being that of non-violence as stressed by Martin Luther King).

All in all, key facts about Ransom can be singled out from the book: (1) He spent almost "ninety years of his life ... as a pastor, editor, politician, writer, civil rights leader, and bishop"; (2) he was "a symbol of an era and a larger movement," having "deep faith and conviction"; (3) he was appointed by President Roosevelt to the Office of Civilian Defense; and (4) on May 7, 1956, Ransom was presented to a conference as the "Sage of Tawawa Springs." Hence the book's title.

Robert F. Fleissner

Central State University