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Frank London Brown
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
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frank london BroWn (october 7, 1927–March 12, 1962) Michael d. hill Whether depicting a young girl’s suicidal reaction to an unwanted pregnancy or a family’s desperate attempt to integrate a neighborhood, Frank London Brown writes about everyday folks and their revelatory encounters with crisis. His works show the sociological imprints that mark his predecessors, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright; however, Brown’s faith in black culture tempers his blunt portrayals of alienating industrialization and institutional racism. His is one of the most celebratory voices in the Chicago Renaissance. Where others stress the city’s ability to erode the individual’s will, Brown unearths the rituals that prepare a hurting soul for redemption. His writings never evade the difficulties of blackness or urbanity, yet using his intimate knowledge of Chicago’s musical and working-class landscapes, he multiplies the perspectives from which a reader may view a dilemma and reveals the durable life-ways and the resilient spirit that nourish the potential for triumph. Brown achieves literary force through what Ruth Miller calls an “unvarnished atmosphere of immediacy.”1 Often treating circumstances that he has experienced firsthand, the writer transforms the crude poetry of survival into poignant testimony. Like James Baldwin, whose spiritual odyssey acts as a multivalent prism for his creative output, Brown confronts the anonymity and the camaraderie, the random treachery and the unexpected sustenance that emanates from urban experience. Facing this reality he emerges as a prophet of a secular gospel, embracing jazz, the blues, and affection as antidotes to the absurdity that threatens modern life. Brown’s command of vernacular speech convincingly evokes his characters’ sensibilities, and his shrewd social awareness compellingly creates the environment that they inhabit. Despite his regionalist tendencies, Brown scrutinizes Chicago’s cultural particularities as a vehicle for comprehending heroism, death, and love in broader African American life. He prizes the city because it vigorously sates his curiosity about the achievement of liberty amid unremitting coercion. 122 • Michael d. hill Brown, the eldest child of Myra Myrtle and Frank London Brown Sr., was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but in 1939, his family moved to Chicago, seeking relief from racial discrimination and financial difficulty. The Browns discovered a city filled with bittersweet possibilities. As a youngster, Frank attended Colman Elementary School. After Colman, he went to DuSable, Chicago’s first high school built for an African American population. DuSable High, named in 1935 to honor the black city father, John Baptiste Point DuSable, featured a high-quality musical program. Under the direction of Walter H. Dyett, this program included a concert band, a marching band, and a jazz band. Dyett also initiated an annual production, the Hi-Jinks show, which spotlighted the varied talents of the student body. Brown’s appreciation of jazz and the blues certainly benefited from these conspicuous resources in his formal education. He also imbibed from his DuSable peers a determination to pursue lofty ambitions. In an environment that nurtured Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago , and renowned publisher William H. Johnson, Brown undoubtedly sensed the need to live meaningfully. He refined his views of that necessity through an unorthodox tutelage on the South Side streets. If 1938 South Wabash Avenue, the address of DuSable High School, represents one pole of Brown’s adolescent enlightenment, then the Fifty-Eighth Street “Stroll” is the other. From Morrie’s Record Shop, where the teenager listened to Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Muddy Waters, and Joe Williams to the ubiquitous tenements that housed “a dark nether-world of crime,” addiction, and despair, the Stroll embodies the irreducible contradictions in black urban life.2 Sterling Stuckey asserts that Brown’s adventures along this “grinding, dehumanizing” thoroughfare form an “apprenticeship.”3 Introducing the inescapable simultaneity of beauty and ugliness, this environment exposes Brown to the disparate experiences that cohabitate the human spirit. Even in high school, he imagined writing might be a way to order these impressions. Sixteen-year-old Brown, in the spring of 1944, visited the offices of Johnson Publishing Company and requested a job as an editor. Since he had no qualifications other than his desire, the episode ended disappointingly; however, it showed Brown’s vague conviction that writing and publishing mattered. As he furthers his education, this conviction strengthens. Brown graduated from DuSable in January 1945. Following a brief stint at Wilberforce University in Ohio, he joined the army in January 1946. While in the service, perhaps inspired by fond memories of the Hi...