This study contributes to a growing body of localized institutional microhistories that recover rhetorical education at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). My research analyzes the pedagogically-focused scholarship of G. David Houston, a Howard University professor and chair of the Department of English during the New Negro movement of the early twentieth century. Using Susan Kates’s concept of activist rhetorics as a heuristic, this study shows that Houston’s work exemplifies an embodied pedagogy that responds directly to Howard University’s unique institutional, historical, and social location.