Sterling Brown

Sterling Allen Brown was born on the first of May 1901 in Washington, D.C., near the Howard campus where his father — the Reverend Sterling Nelson Brown, born enslaved — taught divinity; his mother, Adelaide, a Fisk graduate, read poetry to her son. From Dunbar High School he went to Williams College, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and took his degree in 1922, and added a Harvard master's in 1923.

He taught first at Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, then at Lincoln University in Missouri and at Fisk — and everywhere he listened more than he lectured, gathering the speech, the blues, and the work songs of the people into his ear. Howard University called him in 1929 and held him for forty years. Southern Road (1932) set the folk voice in poetry's own registers — Slim Greer and all — and when the lean thirties turned his second collection, No Hiding Place, away, he put his poems mostly in the drawer for four decades and kept teaching.

As critic and keeper he built the shelves others stand on: Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction in one year (1937), The Negro Caravan (1941) with Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee, and the Federal Writers' Project's Negro Affairs desk, where he edited the nation's account of its Black citizens. His classroom raised generations — Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Ossie Davis, Kwame Ture, Lucille Clifton among them.

The long silence broke late and sweetly: The Last Ride of Wild Bill (1975), then the Collected Poems (1980), a National Poetry Series selection that won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; in 1984 the District of Columbia named him its first Poet Laureate. He died of leukemia at Takoma Park, Maryland, on the thirteenth of January 1989, at eighty-seven. Honored be Sterling Brown, who heard the poetry his people already spoke, and wrote it down.