Dr. Kathleen Mallory

We all know the names and locations of the great battles of the Civil Rights movement: most famously Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Selma and Birmingham. We know of the young people who sat down at lunch counters, or who got onto buses, knowing that they would be facing angry, armed mobs. In Arkansas we honor the nine young students who braved similar mobs to begin the integration of Central High in Little Rock. These civil rights battles became, for the most part, highly public events. In contrast, the long-term struggle to consolidate civil rights was not public. Rather, it was fought in the trenches of everyday life by everyday black folk who steadfastly walked into the offices and schoolrooms and classrooms of newly integrated institutions across America and refused to be driven out. America’s great poet Langston Hughes captured the dedication and courage involved in his pithy poem  “Still Here” which reads:

I been scared and battered.


Snow has friz me,


Sun has baked me,




Looks like between 'em they done

Tried to make me


Stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin'--


But I don't care!


I'm still here!

Dr. Kathleen Mallory of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at SAU is one of these extraordinary everyday folk who is still here. Dr. Mallory grew up in rural Arkansas and received a B.A. degree from Philander Smith College in 1955, one year after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision. That same year she began teaching just up the road in Stephens. Over the next two decades she acquired an M.Ed. degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and taught in various public schools in Crossett, Camden, and Hope as well as at Mississippi Valley College. Dr. Mallory, as we would expect, taught well and in 1971 was Hope-Hempstead County teacher of the year. She’s still here.

In 1974 Dr. Mallory began her career at SAU where she was one of the first black faculty members. Over the past three decades she has taught all levels of composition and literature and was the Writing Project Director. While serving on committees, and attending conferences, and giving papers, and publishing, and raising two daughters Dr. Mallory somehow found the time and commitment to continue her own learning. That quest culminated in 1983 when she received a Ph.D., the highest academic degree, from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Dr. Mallory has stated that she takes special pride in that degree and even greater pride in what she calls the “process” of obtaining her Ph.D.—that is, the long years of step-by step investment in bettering herself. She’s still here.

Dr. Mallory’s extraordinary contributions to SAU and to issues of English Curriculum improvement in Arkansas and the United States are far too numerous to list here. Highlights include: Her Directorship of the National Writing Project program that led to her founding of, and securing endowed funding for, the annual Youth Writing Festival hosted by SAU; her years of service to the curriculum activities of the National Council of Teachers of English which included a two-year term on the Commission on the English Curriculum of the NCTE; her presidency of the Higher Education Section of the Arkansas Education Association; her role on the Advisory Committee for the Voices & Visions TV series on American poets (she wrote the readers guide for the program on Langston Hughes). She’s still here.

What makes Dr. Mallory so remarkable is that her service has not stopped at the doors of the University—that is, she doesn’t reside in that so-called ivory tower. Dr. Mallory has been a public face for SAU in the Black community and has contributed to that community in innumerable ways. For instance, she is a member of the NAACP; of the Urban League; and the National Black Child Development Institute. She was the first president of, and has over a quarter of a century of service to, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Dr. Mallory has also been a member of the Martin Luther King Commission. She was appointed to that Commission by one of her former eighth-grade students, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. She’s still here.

Hard work, determination, steadfastness, and commitment are hallmarks of Dr. Mallory’s day-in day-out approach to life. Though she takes what comes in her stride, don’t let her calm demeanor and lovely smile fool you. They belie a backbone of steel and a moral rectitude that render her a formidable opponent of injustice in any of its myriad forms. That’s why she’s still here.

The Kathleen Mallory Distinguished Lecture Series at Southern Arkansas University reminds us of Dr. Kathleen Mallory’s half century of contributions to the educational systems and community of Southwest Arkansas, generally.