Sterling A Brown

     

Professor Brown devoted his life to the development of an authentic black folk literature. He was one of the first scholars to identify folklore as a vital component of the black aesthetic and to recognize its validity as a form of artistic expression. He worked to legitimatize this genre in several ways. As a critic, Brown exposed the shortcomings of white literature that stereotyped blacks and demonstrated why black authors are best suited to describe the Negro experience. As a poet, he mined the rich vein of black Southern culture, replacing primitive or sentimental caricatures with authentic folk heroes drawn from Afro-American sources. As a teacher, Brown encouraged self-confidence among his students, urging them to find their own literary voices and to educate themselves to be an audience worthy of receiving the special gifts of black literature. Among his students were actor/playwright Ossie Davis, political activist Stokley Carmichael, and the Nobel prize winning novelist, Toni Morrison.

     

Overall, Brown's influence in the field of Afro-American literature has been so great that scholar Darwin T. Turner told Ebony Magazine: "I discovered that all trails led, at some point to Sterling Brown. His Negro Caravan was the anthology of Afro-American. His unpublished study of Afro-American theater was the major work in the field. His study of images of Afro-Americans in American literature was a pioneer work. His essays on folk literature and folklore were preeminent. He was not always the best critic…but Brown was the literary historian who wrote the Bible for the study of Afro-American literature." Brown's dedication to his field was unflinching, but it was not until he was in his late sixties that the author received wide spread public acclaim. In 1968 the Black Consciousness movement revived an interest in his work. ("Sterling Brown." Contemporary Authors. CD-ROM. Detroit: Gale, 1996.)

     

During the 1970s, after years of neglect, Brown's career took an upturn. In 1979 the City Council of the District of Columbia declared his birthday, May 1, Sterling A. Brown Day. "I've been rediscovered, reinstituted, regenerated and recovered," he said in a 1979 interview with The Washington Post. He published The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown in 1980 which won the Lenore Marshall Prize in the early 1980s as the best book of poetry published that year. In 1984 he was named Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia, a position which, The Washington Post wrote, "[he had] held informally for most of his 83 years."  He died in 1989 in Takoma Park, Maryland.