Branham’s multimedia take on ‘America’ wows Bates College students, communication colleagues

Robert Branham is a scholar, a poet, a documentarian, a performer and a professor of rhetoric at Bates College, one of the country’s top liberal arts institutions. He recently combined those talents to produce a multimedia presentation on Samuel Francis Smith’s “America” for the Central States Communication Association meeting in St. Louis. It was the talk of the convention. As CSSA President Larry Frey noted in his June Spectra article on the convention, “When was the last time you saw a standing ovation for a conference program session?”

Branham may be a multidisciplinary talent, but he comes by those tendencies from his career at Bates. Though he teaches in a rhetoric program whose ancestors include A. Craig Baird (in his pre-Iowa days), like faculty at most small colleges Branham must be willing to cross disciplines and to interact with colleagues from other areas of study as part of normal teaching duties. In fact, the “America” project began as part of Branham’s participation in a course he team-taught with faculty from political science, anthropology, English, and religion. Branham was giving a presentation on two African American speakers, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In preparing for the presentation, Branham noted that both Wells and King used the text from “America” in similar ways but in speeches given 70 years apart. Wells’ speech, delivered in Boston, crusaded against the practice of lynching, while King’s speech was his famous “I have a dream,” address delivered from the front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and was a high point of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

From that observation a five-year project was born. Branham began researching “America” and found that it was among the most popular of the patriotic songs about the United States. He also found that it was the most likely to be modified for political purposes. In fact, Branham found that suffragists, labor organizers, and, especially, African American anti-slavery activists and civil rights workers often modified “America” to make the point that America had not yet “let freedom ring” for all of its citizens. Branham’s analysis of these instances led him to argue that this political use of “America” many times took the form of an African American jeremiad. The results of Branham’s scholarship were published as an article, “’Of Thee I Sing’: Contesting ‘America’,” in the December 1996 issue of American Quarterly.

But, an article in a scholarly journal was only one form that this research took. With Charlotte Renner, Branham produced a radio documentary on “America” for Maine Public Radio. That program won a statewide award for best radio news feature. He is also at work on a documentary film and a book, both of which use “America” as the centerpiece but take different approaches to telling this song’s story. The documentary, for example, uses no narration, no interviews, just records of events, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions.

And then there’s the multimedia presentation. Branham used over 100 slides, taped music, live performers, a cappella singing, and six video segments to create his performance. He finds that multimedia productions are very accessible, allow for multiple voices and different perspectives, and enable lively and immediate interaction. Exposure to them forces the viewer to become more critical, Branham reasoned.

Branham has good cause for so reasoning, as he has worked with multimedia presentations in his classes for some time. In fact, working with his classes is key to how he does his scholarship. Branham believes that, in order to be productive as scholars, small college faculty need to integrate their scholarship with their teaching.

Finally, Branham’s scholarship is also integrated with his belief system. Growing up in Oklahoma City during the days of Clara Luper’s sit-ins for civil rights affected him deeply. He was active in the anti-war movement while a student at Dartmouth, and he remains politically active both inside the academy and out. From these experiences he began to appreciate and explore the power of oratory, film and music in political action rhetoric and to believe that the ways in which African Americans express themselves rhetorically challenges traditional notions of how rhetoric works. While working on the “America” project, Branham has also been updating Philip Foner’s classic anthology, Voice of Black America. Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1900. It will be published by the University of Alabama Press in February.

If a professor at a liberal arts college needs to be a teaching scholar, Branham goes the ideal one better by integrating his scholarship into all of his activities. From the sound of things, he’s also enjoying himself enormously.