What's important about Fauset for the understanding of the History of Rhetoric?
Perhaps Fauset was not in any given rhetorical act doing anything radically out of the norm for African American uplift rhetoric. What seems unique about her upon a little bit of reflection is her rhetorical flexibility and her wide ranging spheres of influence. Is it important that any one person embody all pieces of a movement? I don't know. But she was at the literary vanguard, making many of the literary accomplishments of the HR possible. She was participating in the politics of respectability. She was a member of the Talented Tenth. She taught in school and through Crisis as, in Ida B. Wells' terms "good newspapers entering regularly the homes of our people in every state could do more to bring about [justice] than any agency . . . they would be the teachers to those who had been deprived of school advantages" (1893). She spoke publicly, recorded major race rights events journalistically. Perhaps the title could be "A Promiscuous Rhetoric: Jessie Redmon Fauset's Rhetorical Fight for Uplift on All Fronts"
Perhaps I could explore this as evidence that she embraced propaganda: get into people's homes and alter minds. Yet she didn't have much access to white minds. Hmm.
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