My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 110

Because I had interviewed Sterling
Brown, I was encouraged by Henderson
to interview the writer Frank Marshall
Davis on October 24, 1973. This
interview would be helpful to the
literary scholar John Edgar Tidwell.
who in 1992 edited Frank Marshall
Davis — Livin’ The Blues: Memoirs of
A Black Journalist and Poet.
During the 1970s, Frank Marshall
Davis was a mentor to President Barack
Obama while Obama was growing up
in Hawaii. Obama writes about Davis
in his memoir Dreams From My Father:
A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995).
Listening to Sterling Brown talk about
his life was more exciting than reading
John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery
to Freedom. Looking from behind a
camera served as an early reminder that
I couldn’t just write poems, but that
I needed to live the legacy. I needed to
preserve the memories of people that
came before me. My early beginnings
as a literary activist started with the
promotion and documentation of the
work of Sterling Brown.

Thanks, thanks my good friend,
I am in your debt.

In 1981, I served on a D.C. Arts
Commission panel that awarded
Sterling Brown one of the first Mayor’s
Arts Awards. By this time African
American scholars and poets around
the country would begin to celebrate
Brown’s work and honor him. Joanne
Gabbin, Michael Harper, Charles
Rowell, John Edgar Tidwell and Mark
Sanders are some of the individuals
that continue to keep Brown’s memory
alive today.
The Sterling Brown Papers housed at
Howard University now have certain
restrictions placed on the collection.
How this will influence future research
into Brown’s work is difficult to
determine. I suspect, however, that
preserving Brown’s legacy might
require a new generation of literary
activists to step forward.
Finally, Sterling Brown never saw
himself as part of the Harlem
Renaissance or New Negro Movement.
When folks said he might have missed
the boat, Brown reminded them
that he never went down to the dock.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

This documentation of Brown’s life,
along with Leon Damas being on the
advisory board of the Institute for
the Arts and Humanities, pushing for
better p &W6W'fF