Over the past several decades, writing center scholarship has evolved to include multiple theories and pedagogies that led to widely used best practices. As is the case in many disciplines, often writing centers at large, research PWIs are most often cited and highlighted within the scholarship. While many of those readings do offer helpful strategies for working with students at all levels, often they do not account for the unique contexts and diverse student populations that make up many HBCUs. As a result, more research from a variety of writing centers is needed so practitioners see there are multiple ways to operate a successful center and facilitate effective sessions. These authors begin by describing their student population and the HBCU learning environment. They then articulate three specific strategies, many of which directly oppose current mainstream practices, implemented in their writing center that influenced their policies and procedures. Lastly, they explore larger implications for these findings, for they believe aspects of these practices, all with traditions deeply rooted in the often-undervalued affective components of literacy instruction at HBCUs, will advance ideas in the field and ultimately be helpful for staff and students in all writing center contexts.

African Americans and their contributions to our field’s first pedagogical models and operational structures are absent from writing center histories. This archival research invokes their presence by recounting the stories of five African American innovators—Bess Bolden “B. B.” Walcott, Coragreene Johnstone, Anne Cooke, Hugh Gloster, and Percival Bertrand “Bert” Phillips—spanning four decades at three historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Their stories invite an expansive understanding of writing center work, moving beyond a focus on traditional tutoring and strictly alphabetic literacies and into “strategic literacies”—the survival skills needed to stand up for oneself and one’s community in the face of dangerous times and violently racist places. The writing center leaders described here saw writing as a tool to be used in concert with embodied performances for expression and survival to advance struggles for labor equity, legal justice, and civil rights. This conception of writing center work springs from sites of research such as HBCU archives and popular Black press archives that are less often examined by dominant disciplinary histories. From those sites, a timeline of African American writing center administrators emerges that spurs further research of these under-studied figures, who together constitute a remarkable legacy.

Ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an