Howdy! This is Irene and Alexandra with another exciting update about the Sterling A. Brown papers. After a busy fall semester, two more series are now available for use in the Weber Special Collections Reading Room!
The Teaching series documents Sterling A. Brown’s career as an educator. From 1929 to his retirement in 1969, Brown worked at the Howard University English Department. His courses focused on American literature with topics such as regionalism, romanticism, and the “Negro character.” Items in this series include class assessments, handwritten teaching notes, and class materials. The bulk of the material relates to Howard, though SAB did teach at other colleges before and during his time at Howard. This is a valuable set of materials for those interested in learning how and what SAB was teaching at an HBCU during the mid-20th century. Other items in this series include student work and grades, which are restricted due to student privacy laws and concerns.
The Correspondence series contains Brown’s written communications from the early 1920s to the late 1980s. With more than fifty boxes of telegrams, postcards, advertisements, carbon copies, and other ephemeral communications, the breadth Brown’s life in letters easily exceeds any short description. Suffice to say, the Correspondence series reflects important moments in Brown’s personal and professional life, significant events in local and national politics, and shifts in his literary and scholarly circles. Brown maintained relationships with an older generation of writers who helped cultivate his network and literary projects, including W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke. He also built strong relationships with peer writers and thinkers, like Benjamin Botkin, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright. The correspondence series reflects Brown’s long and rich social life and it is now open to researchers thanks to the combined efforts of Ruth Kramer, Fanely Caba, Jes Neal, and Alexandra Nicome.
The Teaching and Correspondence series of the Sterling A. Brown papers are available through our finding aid. Please contact us for more information. Please note that the finding aid (including arrangement and description) will change while processing is in progress. Additional blog posts will be published to keep the Williams community and the public informed.