A Symposium on the Life and Work of Sterling Brown: With Chet Lasell, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Paula Giddings, Sterling Stuckey, Wahneema Lubiano, and Cornel West
- A Symposium on the Life and Work of Sterling Brown With Chet Lasell, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Paula Giddings, Sterling Stuckey, Wahneema Lubiano, and Cornel West
Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Chet Lasell, and I’m Director of Alumni Relations for Williams College. On behalf of the College, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to this symposium on the life and work of Sterling Brown. The connections between Williams and Dunbar High go back to the era of the 1920s, when there was an influx of Dunbar graduates, including Sterling Brown, to Williams. Thus began a close and fruitful relationship that continues today. We greatly appreciate the valuable assistance that Dunbar’s representatives have provided for this program today. This weekend’s events, which honor Sterling Brown and celebrate the visiting professorships established at Williams in his name, would not have been possible without the generosity and dedication of the members of our Williams black alumni network and several of our graduated classes. I also want to acknowledge the hard work and involvement of the members of our Washington Alumni Association and the twenty-one Williams alumni who are members of the highly effective Sterling Brown Events Committee. We sincerely appreciate all of your efforts.
We’re very fortunate to have one of the leading alumna of Dunbar High School and Yale University with us this morning. She is the Honorable Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the District of Columbia in Congress. Formerly the Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she’s the ranking minority member on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committees, and she also serves on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committees. Congresswoman Norton is an attorney and a professor of law. She’s a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Vice Chair for the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues and Secretary to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. For many years she’s been a leader in championing the cause of civil rights. It’s a privilege for me to introduce Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much. Friends and alumni of Williams College and ladies and gentlemen: I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is for me to extend my greetings to you this morning. I can only express my regrets that I will not be here to hear the content of the symposium. I would really like to be able to do that. I apologize that Saturday [End Page 1038] is the day when members of Congress make their rounds. That is to say, you get scheduled into many events in your community. This is the first event of the day and it is one that I would certainly not have missed under any circumstances, for I am so pleased and proud that Williams College has essentially made this Sterling Brown weekend in Washington, DC, with this wonderful symposium inaugurating the establishment of the Sterling Brown Visiting Professorship.
Like you I am of course proud of the achievements of Sterling Brown, Class of ‘22, but I come in special tribute to Sterling Brown, Class of 1918, because that is when he graduated from Dunbar High School, where I was also educated. And that is what Dunbar High School did for us. We did not attend Dunbar High School. We were educated at Dunbar High School. So I come not so much as Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, but as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Class of ‘55, proud to pay tribute to Sterling Brown, Class of 1918.
Brown as an intellectual and a poet surely was influenced not only by legendary Dunbar High School, but by the great poet for whom Dunbar was named. If Paul Laurence Dunbar was the father of the poetry of the Negro idiom, Sterling Brown was the son. Brown studied the idiom and he spoke it and he wrote it. And he wrote it and spoke it with such great wonder, I am sure, in no small part...
