Books by Sterling Brown

Southern Road / The Negro Caravan / The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown  /

The Negro in American Fiction; Negro Poetry and Drama  / Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems

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Books about Sterling Brown

Joanne,Gabbin. Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1994)

John Edgar Tidwell, Sterling A. Brown's A Negro Looks at the South (2007)

Charles Rowell. Callaloo's Sterling A. Brown: Special Issue (1998)

Mark A. Sanders. Afro-Modernist Aesthetics & the Poetry of Sterling Brown (1999)

Mark A. Sanders. A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling Brown (1996)

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Part 1:

An Archival Search for Sterling Brown

Maria Syphax, Historical Revision, or a Communist Plot

By Rudolph Lewis

 Part 2 and Part 3)

I knew nothing of Maria Syphax (1803-1886) of Arlington, Virginia, nor anything of her story or the stories that politicians or literary theorists, or historians may have made of her life. I stumbled onto pieces of her story about seven years ago in the unprocessed papers of Sterling Brown at Howard University. I copied ten to fifteen documents that tied together Sterling Brown's literary relationship to the story of Maria Syphax and Wisconsin Congressman Frank B. Keefe's accusation of a communist plot directing activities in the Federal Writer's Project. 

Maria Syphax was the colored great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, Sterling Brown wrote rather matter-of-factly as if the facts of the assertion were self-evident. In a 1 March 1939 letter, Franke B. Keefe made a formal attempt to contact Professor Brown:

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Brown did not respond to Keefe's letter, immediately. One wonders about his six-week delay. Brown must have immediately called to mind his intellectual defenses against all kind of fears -- the fallout that this matter would have on him professionally. He probably wanted to know who was Frank B. Keefe and his interest in this story. He was a southern. But Keefe was indeed a Republican of Wisconsin and from a small rural community (Winnebago County, maybe 70,000 residents). A lawyer, and firs-time congressman, probably out trying to make a name for himself.

Keefe pointed out that government money had sponsored the publication of Brown's article on the Negro, so what impact, Brown must have asked, his paternity assertion, would have on FWP funding.. Though he was an English professor at Howard University, Brown was no longer an independent scholar (covered under academic freedom), he was a government employee, the Negro Affairs officer of the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, and thus answerable to the government for his writings and political positions. Brown must have found himself indeed in a curious intellectual state.

By the summer of 1937, Sterling Brown had made plans to write the definitive book on the Negro in America, based on materials he was collecting or would collect through his office from the various states that had Negroes on their rolls doing research and writing on materials that they found locally in their states. This book project too would suffer if the FWP went south. This "independent" Negro project was an addition to the initial plans of the FWP. (See Sterling Brown's form letter used to seek Negro advisers to the FWP.) But now it had grown to have more importance than they imagined. (See letter Walter White to Franklin D. Roosevelt.)

My first hint of this Negro FWP operation came through the discovery of letters between Brown and Marcus Bruce Christian, a New Orleans poet and then a member of the Dillard Project of the LA-Federal Writers' Project, headed by Lyle Saxon, a Louisiana writer with a more sentimental view of the Southern past than that which a conscientious "New Negro" would allow or feel fully comfortable (See Selected Letters). The Dillard FWP writers aimed at writing a "history of the Negro in Louisiana," which was finished but never published. There were indeed a Negro in Virginia and a Negro in Illinois published.

Of course, Franke B. Keefe was fully in his rights as an officer of the government to ask another officer of the government, in particular Professor Brown, who has made a public statement concerning the family of a well-beloved president and a revered father of the country, George Washington. The small matter ("incidental") was more than merely a simple statement that Maria Syphax (1803-1886)was the daughter of George Washington Parke Custis (1781-1857). 

Despite all the arguments regarding evidence, a factual statement on the paternity of Maria Syphax was  an attack, however subtle, on the moral hypocrisy of America's founders, their moral duplicity, their closets of skeletons, and, naturally, their "jumping fences." The Negro writers wanted, in the words of Brown, to give "Negro's contributions to the economic and cultural development of America" an "extensive treatment." How could one indeed avoid altogether the touchy subject of miscegenation?

Doubtless, Brown himself must have known that he was making use of a government funded program to promote a revised sense of American history. He hade mad the point himself in his enlisting of Negro advisers:  Negro writers were there on the FWP to ensure that "Negro subject-matter" receive "fair treatment" and presented as "unbiased and as accurate as possible." 

In that two ideas cannot occupy the same place of predominance, this plan of using FWP Negro materials to constitute "a more true picture" of the Negro (the words of Walter White to FDR) and "to establish that mutual respect which is necessary if democracy is to survive" is, in short, quite an undertaking, and indeed a lot of weight to be placing on a single government program.

The expectation of such program seems in all out proportion to the initial notion of providing employment and the collecting and documentation of material. This kind of social engineering would indeed and did  threaten the traditional image Americans possessed regarding the Fathers of their country and the Negro himself, and other more sentimental versions of slavery and Reconstruction. But to drag through the mud the name of Jefferson is however of a lesser magnitude than that of efforts to smear George Washington and his family.

So Brown's 10 April apology fails to reveal to Keefe his mind and thinking on what the purpose and intent of his article "The Negro in Washington." Brown condescended a response to Keefe only after the Wisconsin congressman made the matter public on the floor of Congress:

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Maybe Brown hoped that his "incidental reference" would fade away in the mind of the Congressman  Keefe. But it did not. The Republican organized an opposition in both the House and the Senate and made Brown's "literary crime" ("libelous" assertions) public. The Baltimore Sun reported the story and the Honorable Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina had the SUN article "W.P.A. Guidebook Arouses Fuss" entered into the Appendix of the Congressional Record.

The argument that Sterling Brown presents in two memos to Henry Alsberg, the head of the FWP, is indeed a curious defense. I will present those in yet another file: Henry Alsbery  (Memo 1) and Sterling to Henry Alsbery  (Memo 2).

Maria Syphax Case Table  Part 2 and Part 3)  Part 4 )

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posted 29 June 2008