John Rickford: Speaking My Soul

Stanford Emeriti/ae Council Autobiographical Reflections

On May 15, 2024, John R. Rickford, the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Humanities, Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, engaged emeriti/ae community members with a lecture and slide presentation, entitled “Speaking My Soul: Race, Life and Language.” Rickford dedicates the lecture to his colleague and good friend David Abernethy who had recommended him for a Danforth Fellowship in 1971 thus allowing him to go on to graduate school and pursue an academic career. The talk follows the structure of Rickford’s recently published memoir of the same title, leading his listeners through his life growing up in Guyana, South America, stories about his family and ancestors, student days at Queen’s College high school, attendance at UC Santa Cruz, wedding to wife Angela in 1971, and influential mentors that inspired him to pursue the field of sociolinguistics obtaining his PhD at University of Pennsylvania. He talks about leading “learning expeditions” as Stanford director of African and African American Studies to the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands, Jamaica, and Belize. He recaps the experience in 1990 of teaching with David Abernethy at a Stanford in Oxford summer program on “Britain in the Third World and the Third World in Britain.” Rickford discusses issues such as the use of African American Vernacular English, the life of Dennis Brutus, an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa (who lectured in the Oxford program), and the visit to Stanford of Frederic Willem de Klerk, President of South Africa. Rickford ends by remarking that he has had a life-long love affair with Stanford and plays a short video of the Stanford Chamber Orchestra performing “Hail, Stanford, Hail.”