This project centers around three conversations: the institutional practice of tradition through canon-formation in rhetorical scholarship, the treatment of Black Rhetoric relative to that canonized tradition, and the historical use of the progymnasmata as an iterative system of rhetorical training. Selected works by Percival Everett, bell hooks, and Toni Morrison are examined through the framework of the progymnasmata, a sequence of rhetorical exercises historically used to train students in increasingly complex forms of rhetorical reasoning. Rather than surveying African American rhetoric broadly, the project demonstrates how competencies traditionally formalized within classical rhetorical education become visible within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American discourse. The project highlights the structured rhetorical reasoning present in works that are often interpreted primarily as expressive or performative revealing how African American rhetorical production participates in and expands the broader tradition of rhetorical practice.