Background
Mr. Couch was born one of five children in Morganfield, Kentucky, United States, in 1914. His father was an orphan adopted by a white dentist in Indiana shortly before the turn of the 19th century.
Mr. Couch was born one of five children in Morganfield, Kentucky, United States, in 1914. His father was an orphan adopted by a white dentist in Indiana shortly before the turn of the 19th century.
When William Couch Jr. was about three years old, his father lost his business and the family moved to Chicago. Mr. Couch was a musical prodigy whose conspicuous intellect attracted the attention of Inez Cunningham Stark, a wealthy Chicagoan who discovered the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Mr. Cunningham created a stir in Mr. Couch’s South Chicago neighborhood when she picked him up at his home in her private limousine to introduce him to her poetry circles.
He became a professional jazz musician in his teens and was befriended by Louis Armstrong, who invited him to play trumpet at leading Chicago jazz clubs.He studied music at Roosevelt College, but took a break to pursue music professionally when Nat King Cole hired him to play in his band.
After his marriage, Mr. Couch completed his bachelor’s degree at Roosevelt. In 1953 he earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago’s doctoral program in English literature on a Rockefeller fellowship.
He played with many famous performers, including Cab Calloway, Ethel Waters, Dorothy Donegan, and his first wife, Lillian Cowan.
In 1941 William Couch Jr. became one of the first black combat infantry officers in the nation’s history, eventually commanding a military police battalion on Iwo Jima.
After the war, he lived in New York, where he participated in its literary circles and became a best friend of novelist and scholar Ralph Ellison. He was offered a teaching position at a prestigious white northern college, but its president rescinded the offer because he suspected Mr. Couch was dating a white woman. From 1948-1951, he taught English at Jackson State Teachers College in Mississippi.
In 1953 he was appointed to the literature and languages department at Reed, where he became the school’s first African American professor. Reed recruited him only because he insisted that the University of Chicago send his resume to other than black colleges. That resume, evidently, did not identify him as African American, which may explain the surprise of some of his new colleagues when he arrived for his first faculty meeting.
Mr. Couch taught at Reed for two years, until a recruiter from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, convinced him that he could make a more important contribution to society teaching black kids in the South than white kids at an elite college in the North. When he left Reed, President Frank Griffin [math 1911-1956] presented him with his own University of Chicago PhD hood.
William Couch Jr. spent the rest of his pioneering career at historically black colleges and universities, including West Virginia State College, Jackson State University, Bennett College, Southern University, North Carolina Central University, Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia), Howard University, and Bowie State. He was a senior administrator at Federal City College, where he cofounded the Lorton Prison College Program with his distinguished colleague Dr. Andress Taylor. He published scholarly articles and an important book, New Black Playwrights, An Anthology, which he dedicated to W.E.B. DuBois.
(The experience of the American Negro in a white culture i...)
(Hardcover)
William Couch Jr. married Lillian Cowan. Their marriage ended when he joined the army on December 7, 1941. He married Ola B. Criss (a gerontologist and officer in U.S. State Department) on September 7, 1980. He had two sons from previous marriage (Kenny Criss-Couch and William Noel Edlin) and one stepson Gregg Antonio Jackson.