Coming of Age at Fisk University

This chapter chronicles Reddick’s early life from his adolescence in Jacksonville, Florida to his collegiate career in Nashville, Tennessee. It explains how Fisk University, where he earned a BA in 1932 and an MA in 1933 while studying under Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo Dow Turner, Horace Mann Bond, and Arturo Schomburg, provided Reddick with the social network and intellectual training that guided his early entry into professional academic life. At Fisk, he became active in Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; published in the Journal of Negro Education, The Crisis, and Opportunity; criticized the Southern Agrarians, and studied the racism in history textbooks. This chapter also explains how the Great Depression loomed large in Reddick’s formative years and pushed his politics to the left.