Abstract
This article investigates the role of poet, critic and vanguard Black intellectual Sterling A. Brown in the production of An American Dilemma (Myrdal et al., 1944), a foundational book that would influence national policy in relation to race for at least 50 years after its publication. Commissioned to deliver an analysis of “the Negro in American culture,” Brown set out to create a work of integrity that would convey the richness of African American cultural traditions and contribute to a balanced appraisal of their overarching experiences. The Carnegie Corporation selected outsider Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to lead the study to ensure an unbiased analysis of the “Negro problem.” This apparent commitment to impartiality obscures the reality of the impact of race on the book’s construction. These dynamics had a particularly forceful impact on Brown, the only member of Myrdal’s team with a deep understanding of the historical development, aesthetics and politics of the African American cultural tradition.
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Notes
See for example, Carby 1994. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” pp. 30–44 in History and Memory in African-American Culture, edited by Fabre, G. & O’Meally, R. G. New York [etc.]: Oxford University Press; Kelley 1992. “Notes on Deconstructing “the Folk”.” The American Historical Review 97(5):1440-08; Matlin 2013. On the Corner African American Intellectuals and the Urban Crisis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press; West 2017. “Ta-Nehisi Coates Is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.” in The Guardian. Manchester: The Guardian.
Brown wrote nearly a dozen critical essays and more than 50 reviews for the National Urban League’s Opportunity. Although it had a small number of subscribers in comparison to the NAACP’s journal The Crisis, during the 1920s Opportunity’s influence grew as the The Crisis’s waned. It was a key debating ground for cultural criticism, debates on Black life and racial equality into the 1930s. Charles S. Johnson was editor from Opportunity’s inception in 1923 until 1928 when he departed to Fisk University. Hutchinson 1995. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
See Ellison 1958. “An American Dilemma: A Review.” in Shadow and Act, edited by R. Ellison. New York: Random House. “But can a people…live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?”
This was a history of African Americans in Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century, drawn mainly from data collected during the Federal Writers’ Project.
See for example, Denning 1998. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London, New York: Verso; Jackson 2013. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press; Mullen 1999. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46. Urbana: Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c1999.
The No Hiding Place poems were not published in full until 1980 when Michael S. Harper edited an award-winning anthology. Brown and Harper 1980. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. New York: Harper & Row.
For example, Du Bois had recently proposed an “Encyclopaedia of the Negro” with the support of the Phelps Stokes Fund but Herskovits and Young opposed the funding based on their belief that Du Bois could not be “objective” because of his civil rights activism. Jackson 1990. Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 25–26.
Bunche’s memoranda were “The Political Status of the Negro,” “Conceptions and Ideologies of the Negro Problem,” “Extended Memorandum on the Programs, Ideologies, Tactics and Achievements of Negro Betterment and Interracial Organizations,” and “Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership.”
Myrdal’s belief in the caste system was in contrast to most of the Black scholars on the study (with the exception of Davis and St. Clair Drake). Even the less radical Charles S. Johnson saw a “progressive shifting of these racial relations, notably in the South, from a caste-like structure to a class organization.” Kneebone 1985. Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920–1944. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Myrdal cited Johnson in support of his view that “working off animal spirits” in the countryside could veer into “delinquency” in the city. Johnson 1941. Growing up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South. Washington: American council on education. Cited in Myrdal et al. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers.
The focus here is on “Section G—Music” as it here that Brown had the greatest influence in subsequent decades.
He had advised the authors of Jazzmen and he used it liberally for his memoranda alongside autobiographies, biographies, and magazines like Downbeat, Swing and Esquire. Ramsey and Smith 1939. Jazzmen. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
For example, he paid little attention to the conventions of segregation when travelling with Bunche in the South to the point where Bunche feared for his life on more than one occasion. Jackson 1990. Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 123.
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Beecher, R. Revealing “The Struggle and the Dream”: Sterling A. Brown’s Role in Producing An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. J Afr Am St 25, 402–421 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-021-09546-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-021-09546-2