Sterling Brown: A Race Man in the 1960s

Burr Gym was standing-room-only the night of November 16, 1969. Even the nosebleed seats were filled. Every now and then a tremendous roar of approval would issue from the wildly enthusiastic crowd. No, it wasn’t a basketball game during a CIAA tournament. It was Black Arts night during the “Toward the Black University” Conference organized by the militant students who had taken over the administration building the year before and who were now the official student government. Howard students, I among them, had spent two years fighting with the administration about dormitory rules, student governance, and the need for courses in African-American history and culture. The conference was a time to debate curricular changes, to reinforce student belief in cultural nationalism, to vent spleen against the Howard administration and white America and to codify what students felt was their victory. Black Arts night, which had been designated “Sterling Brown Night,” was about celebration. Some of the heavy hitters of the Black Arts Movement came to pay their respect : Amiri Baraka(who was LeRoi Jones the couple of years he spent as a Howard student in the 1950s), Ossie Davis, and Sonia Sanchez. Tiny little Sonia with her big voice evoked screams of laughter when she read her poem “to all sisters”(sic), which began with the line “what the white woman got” and continued with an indelicate description of various parts of the white woman’s anatomy.

Why was Sterling Brown, the man of the hour, in such a setting? Sterling Brown—poet, critic, and a full professor of American literature in the English Department at Howard—was the son of the influential Howard University professor of theology and minister, Sterling Nelson Brown. Both Rev. Brown and his wife had attended Fisk with W.E.B. DuBois (Brown, “A Son’s Return” 5). Sterling’s wife Daisy was so fair that a fanatic gatekeeper, inspired by the Nation of Islam’s practice of banning whites from their gatherings, once tried to keep her from entering one of Sterling’s readings (Gabbin 60). Most of the students in the gym that night probably had never seen Sterling Brown before and were only vaguely aware of who he was.

Sterling stood up to read, his once tall, slender physique now the paunchy, slightly stooped frame of a sixty-eight-year-old. By the time he finished reading a Slim Greer poem and “The Ballad of Joe Meek” everybody in the gym was cheering. No wonder. The poem in a folk voice chronicles one Joe Meek, a quiet working man who confronts the police when they physically abuse a Black woman. The police response is a Rodney King-style beating that prompts Joe to wipe out the police station with a handgun and to fight off the national guard called in as reinforcement: “The machine guns sputtered, / Didn’t faze Joe at all— / But evvytime he fired / a cop would fall . . .” (Collected Poems 160). ¹

Professor Brown’s choice of poems might strike some critics as pandering to the anti-white, anti-police feelings of the 1960s. Was he simply an old man whose poetry had been ignored for decades and who had now been seduced by the adulation of a young audience whose views he did not share? For Brown had always made clear that he was an integrationist who treasured Black folk culture and literature but who saw it as simply part of the larger American tradition. He writes in his introduction to Negro Caravan that he and his fellow editors (Arthur Paul Davis and Ulysses Lee) “consider[ed] Negro writers to be American writers and literature by American Negroes to be a segment of American literature” (7). Almost thirty years later his position was the same (“A Son’s Return” 18).

There were other areas of conflict with the Black Power movement. He refused to give up the word “Negro.” In his mind it was a wonderful word that connected him both to an African-American elite and the ordinary folk. “I am an old Negro and I am proud of it...