African American Elites Research Articles

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North

Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading

Donna Harrington-Leuker, professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, has written a detailed, thoroughly researched overview of the development of summer reading as an American phenomenon, something that most of us simply take for granted today. Utilizing a wide variety of primary documents, including publishers' records, book reviews, diaries and correspondence of readers, and the popular novels of the period themselves, she demonstrates that the concept of “summer reading” was a consequence of the rise of the middle class in the nineteenth century, with the accompanying concepts of summer travel and summer leisure. Of particular note is her consideration of the educated African American elite and the summer resort communities that catered to their needs.The work illuminates the role of nineteenth-century periodicals in marketing summer reading to vacationers and, in particular, to female vacationers, presenting it as a “genteel performance” (41) taking place in a gendered space under the gaze of marriageable males. Harrington-Leuker also reveals the cultural work of the American summer novel, exploring individual authors and titles in depth. She clearly demonstrates how the early American summer novel, set in summer resorts and “ostensibly about summer leisure … became a narrative of self and society at a transitional moment in nineteenth-century culture.” This section is perhaps the least successful, as it requires a familiarity with those authors and titles and she admits herself that most of them have passed into obscurity, Louisa May Alcott being a notable exception. Her “blood-and-thunder tales” are presented as an example of the way that “the season's saturnalian possibilities … remained a part of the public discourse of summer.” Apparently, what happened at the summer resort stayed at the summer resort.Of particular interest to library historians will be the section on the role of space and place in American Victorian summer reading, including as it does descriptions of social and solitary summer reading, and the establishment of libraries at hotels and summer resorts. These include the Athenaeum library at Saratoga and the library at the Poland Spring resort in Maine. Other than a fascinating mention of guests at various resort communities hosting fundraisers for the local public library, there is no consideration of the public library and summer reading, although the public library does appear in many of the diaries and letters that she cites. Rounding out the volume is a chapter on the Chautauqua Assemblies, other summer schools, and the Catholic Reading Circles, which bear witness to the continuing tension between the desire for light, leisurely summer reading, and the cultural pressure for self and social improvement through reading “the best books.”The book is of interest to anyone interested in the social and cultural history of reading in the United States. It fills a gap in the current literature on print culture in nineteenth-century America in regard to popular fiction. While works such as Sarah Wadsworth's In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America and Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America include popular fiction among the topics they explore, Harrington-Leuker's is the only work devoted specifically to popular fiction and to summer reading and to the role of the publisher in that phenomenon. It provides a background to works such as Joan Shelley Rubin's The Making of Middlebrow Culture, which focus on popular fiction, book club, and reading groups in the twentieth century. It also creates a need for additional works on summer reading in the nineteenth century that would approach it from different perspectives. Certainly there is room for additional work on African Americans and summer reading, as well as the previously mentioned public library and summer reading, and, of course, for the history of children and their summer reading beyond their participation in library summer reading programs.

“Colored Men of the East”: African Americans and the Instability of Race in US–Japan Relations

The article examines two competing popular discourses about race formed around the Japanese delegation that toured the Atlantic seaboard in the summer of 1860 and argues that the divergent white attitudes toward the Asian visitors opened up new discursive opportunities for African American elites to assert national inclusion and critique white racism. Conflicting ideas about Japanese racial difference emerged and played out on the streets and in newspapers, for the diplomats meant differently to white male citizens along class lines—honorable state guests to the merchant and political class in pursuit of lucrative transpacific trade deals, on the one hand, and intruders into the public sphere of white male fraternity to working-class men, on the other. Such rupture, in turn, provided African Americans a platform from which to both criticize the pervasiveness of American racism and demand extension of respect to the domestic “gentlemen of color” as well.

Is Violence Sometimes a Legitimate Right? An African-American Dilemma

AbstractThe contrast, often painted in simplistic colours, between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as civil rights campaigners bolsters an erroneous reading of the freedom struggle of African-Americans, leaving the impression that the resort to violence and self-defence propounded by Malcolm X was a purely circumstantial departure from the general strategy of the civil rights movement.In fact, both of them reflected long on the capacity of violence and a contrario of non-violence to bring about political and social transformation in the context of the extreme brutality and oppression being suffered by African-Americans. Their dilemma stemmed from an old intellectual tradition of the America of the slave period. Well before the ideas of Gandhi won over the African-American elite, and even before Henry David Thoreau laid the theoretical basis for civil disobedience, African slaves gave thought to the legitimacy and effectiveness of violence to amend their situation. The importance of the non-violent movement in the United States and the historical significance of Martin Luther King cannot be understood unless a true measure is taken of the anti-slavery struggle. While within the religious domain, the Black Church played a major role in dissuading violence, secular thought in favour of legitimate forceful rebellion also found itself confronted by a counter-argument which advanced the power of social change and resistance to injustice that non-violence could effect. This article particularly addresses the challenges to their consciences that confronted the militants of non-violence in their campaign for the abolition of slavery and notably those facing the central figure of that struggle, the former slave become the apostle of liberation, Frederick Douglass.

Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums

Employing the lens of African American public history and contested public spaces, Negro Building demonstrates how blacks in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America used community spaces as platforms for activism. Beginning with the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and ending with several black-organized expositions in 1963, Mabel O. Wilson contends that fairs and museums played a critical role in the creation of African American identity. Designed to demonstrate African American progress, the exhibitions and fairs also revealed black anxieties about participation in museums they had been historically barred from visiting or exhibiting in. Wilson examines the challenges, strategies, and receptions of some of the most significant black exhibitions at museums and fairs. She does an excellent job in revealing the conflicts between African American elites and white commissioners and curators about the foci, goals, and types of exhibits. However, while Negro Building provides a comprehensive analysis of the difficult and complex decisions made by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Daniel Murray, Alain Locke, Carter G. Woodson, and a number of other members of the African American intelligentsia, the book would have benefited immensely from both gender and class analysis.

PRESTON H. SMITH II. Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago.

Preston H. Smith II accepts conventional wisdom that a white business class and a compliant state created a “second ghetto” in postwar Chicago that restricted African Americans to segregated inner-city neighborhoods. In contrast to earlier studies, however, Smith downplays the role of white power and examines African American support for class-stratified housing. He argues that privileged African Americans were complicit junior partners in the housing crisis because they shared with whites an assumption that economic inequalities were normal in a capitalist society. This assumption led middle-class blacks to accept the rationale for a private real estate market while rejecting the right to decent housing regardless of the ability to pay. Smith locates the origins of conservative housing policies in the period after World War II when African American elites endorsed scholarly prescriptions about urban pathologies. These theories claimed that social disorganization in urban communities generated a need for a strong local middle class capable of encouraging better behaviors within their ethnic or racial subgroup. Drawing upon these theories, experts like Robert Taylor argued that racial progress depended upon providing modern accommodations for African Americans that could prepare increasing numbers of poor blacks for first-class citizenship. Taylor recognized that private capital was unlikely to build such housing given prevailing stereotypes about the incompetency of the black population. Consequently, he called upon the federal government to construct public housing run by African American middle-class managers with responsibility for promoting habits that made residents more desirable tenants in the private market. Previously, historians characterized such policies as a civil rights issue pitting the united interests of African Americans against white politicians and property owners who resisted racial integration. While Smith's narrative recognizes the importance of whites, it adopts a different perspective to show that systemic class interests created cleavages among African Americans that prevented consideration of the economic factors that produced housing inequalities for poor and working-class blacks.

THE AMBIVALENT GIFT

AbstractThe question of who holds responsibility for racial uplift within African American communities is an enduring one. This paper investigates the understanding of racial obligation on the part of Black elite philanthropic donors. Through in-depth interviews with twenty elite donors, I investigate whether African American elite donors use philanthropic activity to realize their racial obligations by supporting Black nonprofit organizations and charitable causes that directly benefit Black people. I find that Black donors are deeply ambivalent about their position as members of a racial group that is marginalized while they are individually privileged because of their class position. They attempt to reconcile this ambivalence through their philanthropic giving. Donors at times embrace the importance of their racial identity as a principle that organizes their giving practices, but in other instances the very same donors reject race as a factor orienting how they think about their charity. Donors express this inconsistency through three different giving strategies. First, Black donors advocate for what they consider to be Black causes within mainstream organizations—initiatives they believe will directly and positively benefit Black people. Second, while they may support Black nonprofit organizations, they qualify the types of Black organizations worthy of their support. Third, donors reject race as an orienting principle altogether. Indeed, while there are few distinctive patterns among Black elite donors, no matter how they give they do so with an eye towards maintaining a mainstream sensibility that emphasizes integration, efficiency, and success. It is perhaps the diversity of contradictory strategies that poses the most fundamental challenge to the notion of community that permeates discussions of race and responsibility. I conclude by arguing that the ability to define when and how race matters to them is a particular privilege of the Black elite.

The Making of an African American Foreign Policy Lobby: The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa

The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) became adevice of the African American elite for influencing United States policytoward Sub-Saharan Africa between 1962 and 1967, and for intervening inAfrican affairs. Yet, its origin and identity have been largely taken forgranted. The story that is usually told is that the ANLCA, founded in 1962,was an African American organization that was the brainchild of GeorgeHouser. The implication is that the ANLCA was consciously created ab initioas an organization for African Americans by Houser. Why would Housercause to be established an African American organization to pursue thesame objectives as his American Committee on Africa? By problematizingthe origin and identity of the ANLCA, the paper draws attention to thetradition of organizational support for African causes in the United States,and the circumstances that gave form to the ANLCA. It contends that whatHouser proposed, and the African American civil rights elite joined inorganizing, was a conference on Africa, nothing more. That the ANLCAoutlasted the Arden House Conference was not the original design of eitherHouser or the African American civil rights elite or an intended outcome. Asa foreign policy lobby organization, therefore, the ANLCA was a historicalaccident. …U.S.-African relations cannot be adequately understoodunless it is examined within the context of its domesticconstituency

The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance by Maxine Lavon Montgomery (review)

Reviewed by: The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance by Maxine Lavon Montgomery Shirley A. Stave Maxine Lavon Montgomery . The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2010. 144 pp. $35.00. The Fiction of Gloria Naylor, by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, explores Naylor's four major novels, often regarded as a tetralogy, for their treatment of the concept of home insofar as it relates specifically to the lives of the African American women characters portrayed therein. Understanding that home and domesticity are especially vexed terms for a people haunted by the specters of the middle passage and slavery, and continually oppressed by a multifaceted racism that would sunder them from community, Montgomery reads Naylor's inscription of geography and domesticity as significantly different from their treatment by white female authors. She argues that in Naylor, lived spaces can be read as sites of resistance to white authority even as they become liminal spaces that enable the formation of a healthy subjectivity. Montgomery's introductory chapter grounds her work in the theoretical investigation of writers such as Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy, whose postcolonial emphasis on migration and hybridity destabilize fixed notions of race and ethnicity. Reading through the work of bell hooks, Montgomery maintains that Naylor uses the concept of the "border region" as an empowering locus for the formation of identity that is fluid and multiple, effectively able to negotiate the dominant discourse while remaining distinct from it. Home, for the African American subject, is tied less to a geographical space than to a cultural memory; hence, Montgomery insists, Naylor disrupts predictable Western articulations of home to inscribe an alternative conception of a sanctuary that enables the individual to thrive. Each of Naylor's four major novels challenges white, Western understandings of "home" in a different way, even as each identifies forms of resistance that emerged as a result of historically specific forms of racial oppression. Beginning with The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor's first novel in the tetralogy, set in a deteriorating apartment building in an unnamed city during the civil rights years of the 1960s, Montgomery identifies Naylor's agenda in this work as addressing [End Page 265] the "struggle for self-determination on the part of blacks in late-twentieth-century America" (1). Faced with poverty, apathetic bureaucrats, and a bleak future, Naylor presents a community of displaced women who unite to form a functioning extended family that can provide for one another's needs. Montgomery calls attention to the migration from the rural South to the urban North made by many of the residents of Brewster Place. However, unlike naturalist writers such as Ann Petry in The Street, whose main character Lutie Johnson can find no escape from her dilemmas, Naylor provides her female characters with a fierce and resilient maternal figure in the character of Mattie Michael. Fashioning sororal bonds as well as mother-child relationships, the women of Brewster Place unite as a whole in what Montgomery rightly calls a "utopian" project of tearing down the brick wall that isolates them from the city as a whole. However, Montgomery's insistence on limitations imposed by the white patriarchy overlooks the fact that Naylor's women are equally victimized and brutalized by their African American fathers, sons, husbands, and lovers. Additionally, Montgomery only briefly treats the novel's most vexing and horrific scene, the brutal rape and murder of Lorraine, a lesbian who has been, for the most part, shunned by the female community of Brewster Place, and who is tortured not in the urban community at large, but in the alleys of Brewster Place. Montgomery begins her chapter on Naylor's next novel, Linden Hills, by pointing out the author's shift in class focus. Whereas The Women of Brewster Place treated the lives of the urban poor, Linden Hills moves across (the same, unnamed) town to an upper-middle class suburb populated by the African American elite. The kinds of female community developed out of necessary by the women who live in Brewster Place are less available to the more affluent women across town, primarily because the latter are women who...

Black Gotham: a family history of African Americans in nineteenth-century New York City

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in York City. Black Gotham challenges many of the accepted truths about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase nineteenth-century black means enslaved people, that New York state before the Civil refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow. Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, Black Gotham is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture.

Protective interleukin-28B genotype affects hepatitis C virus clearance, but does not contribute to HIV-1 control in a cohort of African–American elite controllers/suppressors

We tested the hypothesis that a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) located near the interleukin-28B gene is associated with the control of hepatitis C virus and HIV-1 replication in elite controllers/suppressors. We show here that the protective genotype is not overrepresented in elite controllers/suppressors compared with HIV-1-seronegative patients and HIV-1-infected patients with viral loads more than 10 000 copies/ml. Thus, it appears that this SNP is not associated with the elite control of HIV-1 infection.

Marketplace Activism

A distinct and significant African American elite market segment began its growth prior to the U.S. Civil War, flourished as a result of two world wars, and has continued to expand and diversify. Today, the segment comprises three subsegments including a conventional upper middle-class, the traditional elite, and the nouveau riche. This market segment is distinct both from other African American groups and from the white elite in terms of products and services consumed. This distinction results from this group's isolation and lack of opportunities through the civil rights era and the importance placed on such factors as ancestry and affiliation within this group. This paper presents a four-phase periodization model of the development of the African American elite market segment, linking its development to key events and historical eras. This segment has practiced a unique form of economic consumer activism in the marketplace—referred to as ``marketplace activism''—in the quest for respect and equal treatment in American society.

Unveiled voices, unvarnished memories: the Cromwell family in slavery and segregation, 1692-1972

When an industrious slave named Willis Hodges Cromwell earned the money to obtain liberty for his wife - who then bought freedom for him and for their children - he set in motion a family saga that resounds today. His youngest son, John Wesley Cromwell, became an educator, lawyer, and newspaper publisher - and one of the most influential men of letters in the generation that bridged Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. Now, in Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories, his granddaughter, Adelaide M. Cromwell, documents the journey of her family from the slave marts of Annapolis to achievements in a variety of learned professions. John W. Cromwell began the family archives from which this book is drawn - letters and documents that provide an unprecedented view of how one black family thought, strived, and survived in American society from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. These papers reflect intimate thoughts about such topics as national and local leaders, moral behavior, color consciousness, and the challenges of everyday life in a racist society. They also convey a wealth of rich insights on the burdens that black parents' demands for achievement placed on their children, the frequently bitter rivalries within the intellectual class of the African American community, and the negative impact on African American women of sexism in a world dominated by black men whose own hold on respect was tentative at best. The voices gathered here give readers an inside look at the formation and networks of the African American elite, as John Cromwell forged friendships with such figures as journalist John E. Bruce and the Reverend Theophilus Gould Steward. Letters with those two faithfully depict the forces that shaped the worldview of the small but steadily expanding community of African American intellectuals who helped transform the nation's attitudes and policies on race, and whose unguarded comments on a wide range of matters will be of particular interest to social historians. Additional correspondence between John and his son, John Jr., brings the family story into modern times. Unveiled Voices, Unvarnished Memories is a rare look at the public and private world of individuals who refused to be circumscribed by racism and the ghetto while pursuing their own well-being. Its narrative depth breaks new ground in African American history and offers a unique primary source for that community.

Black cultural capitalists: African-American elites and the organization of the arts in early twentieth century Boston

This study examines the role of an African-American organization, the League of Women for Community Service (incorporated in 1919), in shaping cultural production and developing arenas for black musical and dramatic performance in Boston. We build upon DiMaggio's work on cultural entrepreneurship by demonstrating that the members of the LWCS were cultural capitalists who worked to build an integrated audience for black artistry largely within the framework of Eurocentric norms. Drawing upon data from the League's archival records (including meeting minutes and correspondences), historical documents (including local news coverage) and biographies, we reveal the manner in which Boston's black Brahmins began to incorporate (but also to diverge from) the organizational practices and aesthetic sensibility of Boston's Anglo-American cultural leaders. Concurrently pursuing the goals of cultural stewardship and anti-racism, members of the LWCS valorized both Eurocentric aesthetics and black cultural forms within a context of rigid racial boundaries and during an era of widespread discrimination. Their efforts to promote cultural uplift helped the LWCS bridge racial boundaries, with moderate success, although they may have also reified intra-racial class divisions. By revealing the processes by which the LWCS introduced black art into the mainstream, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the range of possible strategies African-American cultural organizers used to counter racism.

The Pan-African Brotherhood of Langston Hughes and Nnamdi Azikiwe

The African American Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and the Nigerian Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) were alumni of Lincoln University, transatlantic culture warriors, and literary collaborators. In their friendship of thirty years, the two leaders of twentieth century black discourse shared more in common than there had ever been in relationships between African and African American elites. Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid to the meeting of two great minds who individually and collectively stirred the imagination of their successors across Africa and the black Diaspora. By excavating the influences and unusual similarities in their childhood and adult experiences and by a close reading of their poetry, this paper examines the cultural kinship as well as the shared vision of social justice between Hughes and Zik.

EVERYDAY ANTIRACISM: Competence and Religion in the Cultural Repertoire of the African American Elite

This exploratory study makes a contribution to the literature on antiracism by unpacking the cultural categories through whicheveryday antiracismis experienced and practiced by extraordinarily successful African Americans. Using a phenomenological approach, we focus on processes of classification to analyze the criteria that members of the African American elite mobilize to compare racial groups and establish their equality. We first summarize results from earlier work on the antiracist strategies of White and African American workers. Second, drawing upon in-depth interviews with members of the Black elite, we show that demonstrating intelligence and competence, and gaining knowledge, are particularly valued strategies of equalization, while religion has a subordinate role within their antiracist repertoire. Thus, gaining cultural membership is often equated with educational and occupational attainment. Antiracist strategies that value college education and achievement by the standards of American individualism may exclude many poor and working-class African Americans from cultural membership. In this way, strategies of equalization based on educational and professional competence may prove dysfunctional for racial solidarity.

Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science, and Fundamentalism

Among many visitors to famous trial of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925 was a tall, well-dressed African American named W. H. Moses. The Reverend Mr. Moses was campaign director for National Baptist Convention, largest African American religious organization in nation, and he had traveled to Dayton with a group of African American preachers, students, professors, and physicians from border South. As he viewed trial and sideshows around it, Moses explained to reporters and curious onlookers controversy was particularly relevant to African Americans. A lack of broader education, Moses noted, had left black ministers proverbially hostile to science. For reason, college Negro[es] had become prejudiced against Negro preachers and religion of their fathers to a very harmful degree. Moses hoped trial would demonstrate that Christianity is strengthened by science rather than weakened and conflict would thus restore confidence of the darker races in Christianity.' For heavily churched black community, this was not a trivial matter. Moses and his group were not only African Americans with a keen interest in trial. Black newspapers and black churches sent eyewitnesses to Dayton, editorialists and intellectuals commented with great acerbity on monkey business in Tennessee, and African American ministers delivered hundreds of sermons on topic of evolution and Bible. In Kansas City one African American couple even teamed up to knife a friend who had taken what they considered wrong side of dispute.2 Clearly Scopes trial mattered, and mattered deeply, to many African Americans.

Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood: Dealing with the Powers That Be

In a time when most Americans never questioned premise that women should subordinate to men, and in a place where only white men enjoyed fully rights and privileges of citizenship, many women learned how to negotiate societal boundaries and to claim a share of power for themselves in a male-dominated world. Covering early nineteenth through early twentieth centuries, Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood describes ways southern women found to advance their development and independence and establish their own identities in context of a society that restricted their opportunities and personal freedom. They confronted, cooperated with, and sometimes were co-opted by existing powers: white and African American elite whose status was determined by wealth, family name, gender, race, skin color, or combinations thereof. Some women took action against established powers and, in so doing, strengthened their own communities; some bowed to powers and went along to get along; some became powers, using status to ensure their prosperity as well as their survival. All chose their actions based on time and place in which they lived. In these thought-provoking essays, authors illustrate complex intersections of race, class, and gender as they examine ways in which southern women dealt with the powers that be and, in some instances, became those powers. Elitism, status, and class were always filtered through a prism of race and gender in South, and women of both races played an important role in maintaining as well as challenging hierarchies that existed.

A Gifted Amateur: The Case of George Washington Ellis

George Washington Ellis published Negro Culture in West Africa in 1914 in response to the social gospel prophets' racist and stereotypical perspectives of West Africa and Africans. In so doing. Ellis attempted to shift the discourse from one that emphasized African barbarism to one that repudiated the idea of African inferiority. Unwittingly, however, Ellis preached a brand of romantic racialism—a benign doctrine that was commonplace in the racial discourse of African American elites at the Turn of the Century. Asa consequence, his loyalties were divided between 19th-century ethnological science and the "new ethnology" of Franz Boas. [Keywords: George Washington Ellis, history of racism, antiracism, African American anthropology, social gospel prophets]

Sterling Brown: A Race Man in the 1960s

Sterling Brown: A Race Man in the 1960s Jennifer Jordan (bio) Burr Gym was standing-room-only the night of November 16, 1969. Even the nosebleed seats were filled. Every now and then a tremendous roar of approval would issue from the wildly enthusiastic crowd. No, it wasn’t a basketball game during a CIAA tournament. It was Black Arts night during the “Toward the Black University” Conference organized by the militant students who had taken over the administration building the year before and who were now the official student government. Howard students, I among them, had spent two years fighting with the administration about dormitory rules, student governance, and the need for courses in African-American history and culture. The conference was a time to debate curricular changes, to reinforce student belief in cultural nationalism, to vent spleen against the Howard administration and white America and to codify what students felt was their victory. Black Arts night, which had been designated “Sterling Brown Night,” was about celebration. Some of the heavy hitters of the Black Arts Movement came to pay their respect : Amiri Baraka(who was LeRoi Jones the couple of years he spent as a Howard student in the 1950s), Ossie Davis, and Sonia Sanchez. Tiny little Sonia with her big voice evoked screams of laughter when she read her poem “to all sisters”(sic), which began with the line “what the white woman got” and continued with an indelicate description of various parts of the white woman’s anatomy. Why was Sterling Brown, the man of the hour, in such a setting? Sterling Brown—poet, critic, and a full professor of American literature in the English Department at Howard—was the son of the influential Howard University professor of theology and minister, Sterling Nelson Brown. Both Rev. Brown and his wife had attended Fisk with W.E.B. DuBois (Brown, “A Son’s Return” 5). Sterling’s wife Daisy was so fair that a fanatic gatekeeper, inspired by the Nation of Islam’s practice of banning whites from their gatherings, once tried to keep her from entering one of Sterling’s readings (Gabbin 60). Most of the students in the gym that night probably had never seen Sterling Brown before and were only vaguely aware of who he was. Sterling stood up to read, his once tall, slender physique now the paunchy, slightly stooped frame of a sixty-eight-year-old. By the time he finished reading a Slim Greer poem and “The Ballad of Joe Meek” everybody in the gym was cheering. No wonder. The poem in a folk voice chronicles one Joe Meek, a quiet working man who confronts the police when they physically abuse a Black woman. The police response is a Rodney King-style beating that prompts Joe to wipe out the police station with a handgun and to fight off the national guard called in as reinforcement: “The machine [End Page 888] guns sputtered, / Didn’t faze Joe at all— / But evvytime he fired / a cop would fall . . .” (Collected Poems 160). 1 Professor Brown’s choice of poems might strike some critics as pandering to the anti-white, anti-police feelings of the 1960s. Was he simply an old man whose poetry had been ignored for decades and who had now been seduced by the adulation of a young audience whose views he did not share? For Brown had always made clear that he was an integrationist who treasured Black folk culture and literature but who saw it as simply part of the larger American tradition. He writes in his introduction to Negro Caravan that he and his fellow editors (Arthur Paul Davis and Ulysses Lee) “consider[ed] Negro writers to be American writers and literature by American Negroes to be a segment of American literature” (7). Almost thirty years later his position was the same (“A Son’s Return” 18). There were other areas of conflict with the Black Power movement. He refused to give up the word “Negro.” In his mind it was a wonderful word that connected him both to an African-American elite and the ordinary folk. “I am an old Negro and I am proud of it...