Every day this month, the Center for Black Educator Development, in partnership with Education Post and Philly’s 7th Ward, will highlight a Black Educator Hall of Famer.
But, don’t forget, e’ry month is Black History Month and February is just the Blackest. All year are ongoing opportunities to learn and teach and the colossal impact Black educators have had on society.
Today, our featured Black educator is Sterling A. Brown.
Sterling Allen Brown was born in Washington D.C. on May 1, 1901. He is the son of two educators. His father was a theologian and professor at Howard University and his mother was a public-school teacher in Washington D.C. public schools. With that, education and the spirit of teaching resided in Sterling Brown.
He graduated from the prestigious, Dunbar High School and was valedictorian of his class. He attended Williams College in Massachusetts on scholarship where he graduated in 1922. He’s also a graduate of Harvard University where he received his master’s in English in 1923. After receiving his master degree, Brown continued in the footsteps of both his parents and became a teacher. He taught at numerous universities early on including Virginia Theological Seminary and Fisk University. But Brown’s career was solidified at the Mecca.
Brown became a professor at Howard University in 1929 and he would remain there for 40 years. As a professor, teaching was a priority. He introduced Howard’s first course in African-American literature, and he taught a who’s who of distinguished student students including Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Ozzie Davis, and Dr. Kenneth B Clark.
Teaching was Brown’s dedicated vocation. But Brown was also a writer and a poet, dedicated to the craft as well as properly representing African-Americans in the genre of literature. Brown served also as a visiting professor to numerous universities, including NYU, Atlanta University (Clark Atlanta University), and Yale University where he taught about African-American literature.
His poetry dealt with Black people in a way that humanized the Black experience that would otherwise be seen as savagery by the mainstream. His ability to humanize Black people stripped away the myths and stereotypes white had of them. But not only that, he engaged in study to deconstruct black stereotypes. He’s the author of Negro Character as seen by White Authors, the Negro in American Fiction, and Negro Poetry and Drama.
These pieces set the foundation for properly looking and portraying the Negro in art as well as critiquing the racist ways that they did so. For this, Brown is known as the founder of African-American literary criticism.
His work illuminated a Black people that we are the masters of our own narrative, and that while others may see us one-way (social structure), but there’s a way that we ought to see ourselves, and that has to do with how we relate to one another (governance). This work lives on in the spirit of Howard university including one of its professors, Dr. Greg Carr, who teaches in the same spirit.
Sterling A. Brown; a member of the Black Educator Hall of Fame.
For more information on Sterling A. Brown, visit the following site.
