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 2:

An Archival Search for Sterling Brown

Maria Syphax, Historical Revision, or a Communist Plot

By Rudolph Lewis

Before I began my Sterling Brown search, I had three pieces of correspondence between Brown and Marcus Bruce Christian. The first made a Request for Historical Material on New Orleans and the cooperation of Christian, one of the Dillard Projects most knowledgeable Negro editors. The second letter detailed the Assignment, specifying the Louisiana folk material that most interested Brown. The third letter was one of thanks for the history material . All three letters were written between September and December 1937, which suggests the material was in the Dillard office or at Christian's finger tips, but needed an editor to put it into some usable order and provide documentation.

I was not able to find the material Christian sent Brown, neither at the National Archives, which would have ordinarily kept the files of a government agency, nor at The Library of Congress, where materials from the project were eventually sent and organized. Individuals from the Writers' Project argued that the intent of the Writers' Project was to develop research materials that could be usable by the general public. Seemingly, the Louisiana material from the project had indeed been used, but not returned. 

This emptiness of the Louisiana files and the seemingly loss of the Christian materials sent Brown led me to Brown's papers at Howard University's Spingarn-Moorland Archives. I then stumbled onto the Syphax Case, which was eventually brought to the floor of the Congress and the Senate (see file titled: "W.P.A. Guidebook Arouses Fuss" ). Sterling Brown, matter-of-factly, stated as an "incidental" that George Washington Parke Custis (1781-1857) had a colored daughter Maria Syphax (1803-1886), to which Franke B. Keefe, Congressman from Wisconsin, wrote to Brown a letter requesting the evidence for his conclusion and to which Keefe disagreed vehemently in public that there were facts to sustain such a conclusion.

Like Franke B. Keefe, many Republicans were against Franklin D. Roosevelt and his policies which allowed government intrusion into America's economy. The primary task of the writers' project was the employment of writers. According to the figures of Congressman Keefe the project had "cost the taxpayers of the Nation since the summer of 1935 through February 28, 1939, $15,016,632."

Initially, the Negro writer, of which many were ignorant, was overlooked in the state organizations of the Federal Writers' Project. When opposition rose, the FWP attempted immediately to correct the oversight and Negro writers were employed in the states. Some states however created separate divisions to accommodate them. Several of these state Negro divisions saw eventually as their primary task the production of state histories of the Negro -- The Negro in Virginia, The Negro in Illinois, and there was one planned for the Negro in Louisiana. This manuscript was last worked on by Marcus Christian but was never published.

Arna Bontemps, I believe, was in charge of the Negro project in Illinois and Roscoe E. Lewis was responsible for the Virginia Negro project and the publication of its book. The idea of creating books on the Negro, with a Negro perspective (or sensitivity), seems to have been a goal that grew gradually after the employment of Negro writers. We get some sense of this from the 1936 Brown letter to Roscoe E. Lewis:

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Beyond employment of Negro writers and the collection of Negro materials, Brown nor other black writers  had seemingly given no thought to publishing books from collected material. The idea seems to have arisen with the FWP director, Henry Alsberg, seemingly as a bureaucratic means to substantiate the work and the cost of this WPA program, and the addition of Negro writers. 

In its initial goals, the FWP was of such critical import that Alain Locke, professor of Philosophy at Howard, was willing to lend his name and reputation to its continued  congressional support:

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A Guggenheim Fellow (1937), Sterling Brown must have kept his Howard colleague well-informed of the progress of the Negro relationship to the FWP and its rising financial woes with Congress. Locke wrote his letter a month after Brown had attempted to defend himself to Alsberg against the charges made by Franke B. Keefe on the floor of Congress. 

We will turn to those two memos for a review momentarily. In the first memo to Alsberg, Brown defends himself against what he views as the specifics of Keefe's charges. In the second memo Brown attempts to provide the proof that Maria Syphax (1803-1886) was indeed the colored daughter of George Washington Parke Custis (1781-1857). 

Neither memo is thoroughly convincing. The government's position presently (2004) is that which was stated by Keefe, that is, Maria Syphax was the "daughter of two old retainers who had served his [Custis'] grandmother [Martha Washington] and George Washington for many, many years." 

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posted 29 June 2008