COMM Professor Houck publishes his second book volume on Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement

Posted by Matthew Prince on
Dr. Davis W. Houck
Dr. Davis W. Houck

Dr. Davis W. Houck, a professor at Florida State University (FSU)’s School of Communication, published the second volume of his civil rights recovery project, Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965, with Baylor University Press (co-edited with David E. Dixon).

Rhetoric Religion and the Civil Rights Movement second volume
Rhetoric Religion and the Civil Rights Movement- Second Volume

This second book volume required extensive work to collect and archive from audiotapes to old documents.  These speeches are what many would consider accounts of the most significant domestic drama in American history.  It is a collection of 50 new speeches and sermons, with only a single speaker repeated.  That exception, Lillian Smith, “whose material was so ahead of her time that…which is why I felt it necessary to feature her work in the second volume.”

Houck’s first volume of this project, over 1,000 pages long, was a labor of love that spilled over into the subsequent volume.  “It archives our national leaders and activists and how their speeches moved a nation to live with ideals from the Bible that were infrequently practiced but often professed,” he said.

The second volume expands on the first by including local and smaller-scale addresses that provided additional momentum during the Civil Rights Movement.  Houck mentioned, “Deriving some of the speeches from the church context helps bring clarity to the role religion played in the civil rights movement.”

Houck is the author and editor of 10 books including volumes 1 and 2 of Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965, Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press (with Matthew A. Grindy), Rhetoric as Currency: Hoover, Roosevelt and the Great Depression (winner of the Marie Hochmuth Nichols award) and a Pulitzer submitted monograph, FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address.

A nationally recognized expert on the American civil rights movement, Houck has also been honored for his work with Leon County’s Boys and Girls Clubs with FSU’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Service Award and the Florida Education Association’s Human Rights Award.  His most recent project is a multi-user public speaking textbook with FlipLearning, which has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Kauffman Foundation.

 

Find some archives of past news highlights where Houck was featured at: