The Editor's Note

The purpose of this issue of Callaloo is to celebrate the life and work of Sterling Allen Brown (1901–1989), that extraordinary African-American poet, controversial literary and cultural critic, and tireless cultural worker who taught legions of students at Howard University for over forty years: Sterling Brown, whose seminal critiques and poetic representations defended a people, lives and a culture that were being distorted and denigrated by white supremacists—bigots with the aim of perpetuating the European-American project of domination and exploitation. Sterling Brown, whose efforts to preserve and restore the vernacular art and culture of the rural Black South anticipate the institutionalization of what we now refer to as African-American literary studies. Sterling Brown, whose efforts to celebrate, document, and preserve facets of the vernacular art and culture of the rural Black South provided the groundwork upon which a great number of African-American writers have created texts that are informed and shaped by the values, aesthetics, and world view of that culture. Sterling Brown, whose truth-telling voice and self-declaring work challenged the propaganda and politics of the ruling class in the academy, which to this very day fails to acknowledge adequately the presence and importance of his work either as a poet, a literary critic, or a cultural worker. It is largely the engaging critical and creative minds represented in this issue of Callaloo that have made efforts here and elsewhere to remind us of the work and achievement of Sterling A. Brown.

Like numerous black, white, and other U.S. American scholars of my generation, I, unfortunately, did not encounter Sterling Brown’s poetry and critical work early in my career; I came to his work during the late 1960s, when not a few Americanists nationwide began to realize the value of including Black America as part of the study of U.S. American literature, life, history and culture. The current nationwide interest in Sterling Brown’s work (as well as that in black literature in general) is, in part, the result of the cultural and aesthetic revolution of the Black Arts Movement, and the political and academic activism of the black studies movement—two of the cultural wings of the Black Power Movement. Thanks to these movements and their far-reaching intellectual and cultural prescriptions, I was introduced to the poetry, and literary and cultural criticism of Sterling Brown; and I, in 1969, shifted my emphasis in graduate studies from English literature to American literature, where I thought I could help effect radical change. I vowed that I would prepare myself to join that small band of scholars who were working to make sure that literary texts by African Americans would become the subject of study in colleges and universities throughout the United States. For nefarious reasons that were intended to inferiorize black people, institutions I had attended had deprived me—and legions of my generation studying English—of formal classroom study of African-American writers, thus making them invisible. But then came the intervention: the political and literary discourse that sustained my introduction to Sterling Brown, as represented in Black World, The Black Scholar, and numerous other now-defunct periodicals.

With that introduction came self-directed study which supplemented what I read in graduate courses as “American literature”—first the study of Sterling Brown as poet and then the study of Sterling Brown as literary and cultural critic. I soon discovered that to read him as a poet is to encounter a variety of cultural texts and aesthetic values, the main of which led me to an understanding of a major feature of African-American literature—the persisting interest of its poets and fiction writers in vernacular culture. Vernacular culture is the bone structure of Sterling Brown’s poetry. No wonder that James Weldon Johnson’s assessment of his poetry is also a tribute to Sterling Brown’s mining the vernacular. Commenting on Southern Road (1932), Sterling Brown’s first volume of poetry, Johnson wrote that he

has made more than mere transcription of folk poetry, and he has done more than bring to it mere artistry; he has deepened...