Sterling Allen Brown: From Harlem Renaissance Architect to Poet Laureate

If there were any man born to be an academician, it would have been Sterling Allen Brown who was literally born in Howard University in Washington D.C. on May 1, 1901 to Sterling Nelson and Adelaide Brown. The Brown family clearly rose from humble beginnings and although they never became affluent, they were able to go beyond what was expected of them by society. Sterling Nelson was a former slave, but both he and his wife had finished college. Sterling Nelson eventually became a professor at Howard University and a minister at their church.

Aside from being exposed to the academic life at an early age, Brown was also motivate by his well educated parents to develop a liking for reading the works of great poets. He was the top graduate at Dunbar High School and Williams College subsequently offered him an academic scholarship when he was yet seventeen. While in college he began to delve into Black American music such as jazz and the blues. His interest in this type of music eventually came to influence his works as a poet. He went on to Harvard University to study for a masters degree.

Throughout his academic life, he became exposed to the works of such literary greats as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Lee Masters, Joseph Conrad, Edward Arlington Robinson, Sinclair Lewis and Robert Frost. Brown however was able to come out on his own as a poet regardless of others' influence on his style. He wrote primarily about African Americans in the rural context particularly about the southern blacks, delving into the moving simplicity of the common black folk. What is especially noticeable is how traditional poetics came to be married with the African American tongue in his works, with the essential elements of African American music clearly in play in the structure of his poems. While African American music was not popular then in mainstream music, Brown came to actively support it.

Southern Road, his first book of poetry was published in 1932. His other works such as the The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narratives, Negro in American Fiction and Negro Poetry and Drama soon followed.

As a teacher he has come to influence students and fellow poets in many universities across the country such as Virginia Seminary College, New York University, Lincoln University, Fisk University, Atlanta University, Vassar College and Howard University where he was a teacher for forty years. Among his famous students throughout his career were Amiri Baraka, Kwame Ture, Ossie Davis, Thomas Sowell, Kwame Nkrumah and Gwendolyn Brooks.

He was the Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia and was accepted as a member of the Academy of American Poets. Harvard University, Howard University, Vassar College, Williams College and Brown Universities accorded him honorary doctorate degrees.

He and his wife, Daisy Turnbull had two children. Sick with leukemia, he died in 1989 in Maryland.