Immersed in the ballads and lore of African-Americans, Sterling Allen Brown devoted his life to surmounting black stereotypes. He was a master teacher as well as a master poet of the ballad, sonnet, free verse, and blues form in the years following the urban-centered Harlem Renaissance. Brown elevated rural themes and championed black heroes like Stagolee, Big Boy, John Henry, and Casey Jones. Both an author and literary historian, Brown preserved natural black dialect and religious and secular folk culture, as demonstrated by Slim Greer, his ballad hero, and by essays on the jazz of Earl “Fatha” Hines, Fats Waller, and Louis Armstrong. For his Afro-centrism, Brown earned the praise of his peers, in particular, James Weldon Johnson.
Brown was born on May 1, 1901, in Washington, D.C., the son of a former slave, the Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown, who was a religion professor at Howard University’s divinity school. His mother, Fisk graduate Adelaide Allen, encouraged him to love classic verse, as well as the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
By 1922, Brown had become a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. During graduate studies at Harvard on a Clark fellowship, he spurned the scholarly elitism of T. S. Eliot and emulated the populism of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg, as well as the folk inspiration of Afro-American work songs, blues, and spirituals.
After marrying Daisy Turnbull, Brown made the most of the Harlem scene by hobnobbing with black artists. Poet/editor Countée Cullen included him in the anthology Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927); James Weldon Johnson did likewise in The Book of American Negro Poetry (1930), as did Benjamin A. Botkin, editor of Folk–Say (1930). Brown initiated “The Literary Scene: Chronicle and Comment,” a column for Opportunity, which helped steer audiences to authentic black literature.
An exacting writer, editor, and critic, Brown thought of himself primarily as a professor of English. He taught at Virginia Seminary and College and at Lincoln, Fisk, and Howard universities. Among his most promising students were actor/playwright Ossie Davis, activist Stokely Carmichael, and Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison; similarly, Brown’s Afro-centrism influenced poet Amiri Baraka and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston.
Brown took serious interest in black representation in the arts, as demonstrated by his eloquent artistic commentary and film reviews in Opportunity and by a notable first collection, Southern Road (1932). An energized first-person collection, it took its title from the richly humorous, compassionate material he acquired while teaching in the Jim Crow South. To Brown’s dismay, a second collection, No Hiding Place, found no publisher because the Depression ended easy access to white publishing houses, which had once courted black poets.
Brown, a pragmatist above all, turned from poetry to prose. Simultaneous with a Guggenheim Fellowship, he served the Federal Writers’ Project for three years as editor of Negro affairs and contributor to American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse (1937) and Washington City and Capital (1937), both published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. In 1939, he joined the staff of the Carnegie-Myrdal Study of the Negro in American Life. In addition to issuing literary criticism, he collaborated with Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee on a comprehensive Afro-centric anthology, The Negro Caravan (1941).
The poet’s writings added to the wealth of post–Harlem Renaissance fervor in numerous anthologies and journals. Four prose masterworks—Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction, published in 1937 and reissued in 1969, and The Negro Newcomers in Detroit and The Negro in Washington, written with George E. Haynes in 1970—display his scholarship and articulate analyses. In 1973, Folkway Records released Sixteen Poems by Sterling Brown, a disc recording. Late volumes of verse include The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems (1975) and The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (1980), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry prize.
Brown earned a reputation for refinement, pedagogical skill, an easy, unpretentious manner, and commitment to his race. In his scholarly essays, he defied the Fugitive Agrarian set at Vanderbilt and warned of a trend toward glorifying the slave-era South. To combat false memories that glossed over slavery, he urged black authors to discredit short-sightedness and to create literature from a stringently truth-seeking perspective. Shortly before his death in 1989, he was named Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia.
