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Thomas Freeman, RIP

Thomas Freeman, Renowned Debate Coach in Texas, Dies at 100

Thomas Freeman, the legendary Texas Southern University debate coach who was the first African American professor to teach in the School of Humanities at Rice, has died at the age of 100.
Dr. Freeman with his award-winning Texas Southern debate team in 1985. “You don’t remember me,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once told him, “but I remember you.”
Dr. Freeman with his award-winning Texas Southern debate team in 1985. “You don’t remember me,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once told him, “but I remember you.” Credit…via Texas Southern University
Thomas Freeman posed with the faculty of Rice University’s Department of Religious Studies in a photograph from the 1987 Campanile. L to R: Sylvia Louie, Niels Nielsen, Elizabeth Heitman, Werner Kelber, Clyde Manschreck, Thomas Freeman, Warren Frisina, George Rupp (President of Rice University at the time), Don Benjamin and James Sellers. “Religious Studies Department, Rice University.” (1987) Rice University: https://hdl.handle.net/1911/76275.

Freeman taught religion courses at Rice from 1972 until 1994. He designed his own courses, which started out small but quickly grew in popularity. In a 2012 interview, Freeman laughed as he talked about becoming a lecturer at a university that was founded as a segregated institution and didn’t admit black students until 1965.

“(W)hen I walked across the campus, (William) Marsh (Rice) must have been turning over in his grave,” Freeman said. “He didn’t want a black student there, and here’s a black teacher. … Now it’s fortunate that succeeding generations saw the error in that kind of thinking, and went to the forefront so that blacks could attend.”

Dr. Freeman was 15 when he enrolled at Virginia Union University. He graduated in 1939 with a bachelor’s degree in English. He then attended Andover Newton Theological Seminary, graduating at the top of his class in 1942. Dr. Freeman studied briefly at Harvard and Boston University and received his doctorate in homiletics from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1948.

Read more about this remarkable man HERE, HERE and HERE.

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