"Runnin' space": the continuing legacy of Sterling Allen Brown

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Eleanor W. Traylor, R. Victoria Arana, John M. Reilly

Following out Brown's train of thought through the works of his legion students (Traylor and Winston included), it is today possible - as many in the academy are doing - to imagine African American literature at the very heart of American literature, to conceptualize a healthy cultural open-heartedness (call it "multiculturalism," "pluralism," or what you will), and to understand in a concrete way the constructedness of the world of discourse. For Brown, the primacy of language - oral as well as written - needed to be recognized before social changes could be slowly wrought. He analyzed American discursive patterns (and quipped on them) well before the French theorized the possibility of an archaeology of epistemes. He opened up the canon of American literature to include popular ballads previously unrecorded and, with Arthur P. Davis, anthologized polemical texts and periodical essays - long before the academy recognized these forms of textuality as relevant to the study of literary history, indeed long before it recognized such texts themselves as literature. Hortense Simmons provides insight into the inimitable tone with which Sterling Brown accomplished these aims in his "Literary Chronicles."

Professor Brown's students saw him as more than a role model. At the Howard conference, Michael Thelwell, Ronald Palmer, Michael Harper, Robert O'Meally, ntozake shange, Haki Madhubuti, Fahamisha Brown, Joyce Camper, Lorenzo Thomas, John Edgar Tidwell, and Beverly Skinner all agreed that Sterling Brown was more like a Force. In fact, the interdisciplinary approaches of the humanities and our National Conversations today owe much to the work of Professor's generations of students and admirers, to the waves of teachers, common readers, and public intellectuals whose lives and souls he touched or whose fields of scholarly study have included African American literature and culture. Brown was dedicated to the spirited appreciation of humane human values, an attribute of his that we wish to recognize here in a formal if preliminary way. As Jeanne-Marie Miller has put it, Sterling A. Brown was "in the vanguard of progressive thinkers on race relations in the United States and in the forefront of experimentalists in American poetry" (1) - in truth, a man who created runnin' space.

Works Cited

Brown, Sterling A. "A Son's Return: 'Oh Didn't He Ramble.'" Chant of Saints. Ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. 3-22.

Miller, Jeanne-Marie A. "Sterling Allen Brown (1901-)." Profiles (Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Howard U) 3 (Mar. 1983): 1-20. [Includes a bibliography of Brown's publications.]

Winston, Michael A "Sterling Brown: A Tribute." New Directions: The Howard University Magazine 16 (Apr. 1989): 26-29.

Eleanor W. Traylor, R. Victoria Arana, and John M. Reilly are faculty in the Department of English at Howard University, which hosted a Sterling A. Brown Conference this past spring with support from the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C. The nine essays which follow this introduction were presented as papers at the Howard conference on February 14, 1997.