in Washington, D.C., the son of Sterling Nelson
Brown, a former slave and a Howard University
professor of theology. A graduate of Dunbar High
School, where his teachers included novelist JESSIE
REDMON FAUSET, Brown was educated at Massa-
chusetts’s Williams College, where he received his
B.A. degree Phi Beta Kappa, and at Harvard Uni-
versity, where he received an M.A. degree in En-
glish. During the Great Depression, Brown, who
had been book review editor for OPPORTUNITY,
became the editor of Negro Affairs for the Federal
Writers’ Project of the WPA (1936–1939) and a
staff member for the Carnegie-Myrdal Study of
the Negro (1939). His work appeared in the New
Republic, The Journal of Negro Education, CRISIS,
Phylon, and the Massachusetts Review. Although
late in his career as an educator he became a visit-
ing professor at New York University and Vassar
College, Brown spent most of his academic life in
historical black colleges and universities, includ-
ing Lincoln University, Fisk University, and par-
ticularly Howard University, where he was on the
English faculty for 40 years.
Brown published his first collection of poems,
SOUTHERN ROAD, in 1932. His second collection,
The Last Ride of Wild Bill, was published more
than 40 years later, in 1973. His final collection of
poems, The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown,
was published by BROADSIDE PRESS in 1980. Given
Broadside’s association with the main poets of
the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, primarily Don L. Lee
(HAKI MADHUBUTI), SONIA SANCHEZ, and ETHER-
IDGE KNIGHT, this was quite a statement by the
senior poet and “dedicated genius,” as HOUSTON
BAKER called Brown (92).
Between publishing his collection of poems and
working for the WPA, Brown established himself
as an authority on the black writer in America and
on the subject of blacks as characters and stereo-
types in American literature in such now-classic
scholarly works as The Negro in American Fiction
(1937) and Negro Poetry and Drama (1937). As the
senior editor, Brown, along with Arthur P. Davis
and Ulysses Lee, compiled the pioneering compre-
hensive anthology on African-American literature
The NEGRO CARAVAN (1941).
As Baker has noted, during this period Brown
was mining the BLUES, a form indigenous to black
southern culture that was, ironically, deemed of
lesser importance by the black intelligentsia lead-
ers of the HARLEM RENAISSANCE, including ALAIN
LOCKE and W. E. B. DUBOIS. As the editors of CALL
AND RESPONSE noted, “Brown was in the acad-
emy but never completely of it” (993). Nor was
he a full-fledged member of the Harlem Renais-
sance, although Locke would eventually describe
Brown as a true Negro folk poet like LANGSTON
HUGHES and ZORA NEALE HURSTON, who wanted
to make the individuals Hughes called the “low
down folks” and “the so-called common element”
(900), the true representative of the “New Negro
Movement” and thus the most credible agent of
black culture. Brown, although himself a member
of DuBois’s “Talented Tenth” of the black middle
class, used his work to celebrate the “unwashed”
masses, whom, ultimately, he saw as his best
teachers.
As the poems in Southern Road reveal Brown
found more than humor and pathos in poetry
written in black dialect, the genre he embraced
after living in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he taught
at Virginia Seminary and College. In fact, as Cor-
nel West and Henry L. Gates, Jr., point out, Brown
“resuscitated dialect poetry, a genre that had been
confined to what one critic called ‘the waste-bins
of minstrelsy’ ” (119). It had been abandoned by
even JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, the distinguished
scholar and poet known best for his celebration of
black folk culture in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro
Sermons, who had also written in dialect. Brown
saw the black folk tradition as the foundation of
African-American literary tradition.
Brown’s poetry reveals his careful attention to
black speech, his validation of black folklore and
myth, and his preservation of black culture in its
multifaceted form, particularly music: spirituals,
jazz, work songs, and specifically the blues. The re-
cipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Brown was
given an honorary doctorate by Howard Univer-
sity, due, Gates and West claim, to the lobbying of
many of his students who had gone on to become
the leaders of the Black Arts Movement.80 Brown, Sterling Allen