SOURCE: Rowell, Charles H. “Sterling A. Brown and the Afro-American Folk Tradition.” In Harlem Renaissance Re-examined: A Revised and Expanded Edition, edited by Victor A. Kramer and Robert A. Russ, pp. 333-53. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitson Publishing Company, 1997.

In the following essay, Rowell explores how Brown's studies of African American folk traditions and culture impacted his poetic work.

One of the concerted efforts of the “New Negro” writers of the Twenties and Thirties was the attempt to reinterpret black life in America and thereby provide a more accurate, more objective, representation of black people than that popularized in the reactionary and sentimental literature of the preceding decades. Alain Locke, a major voice of the New Negro Movement, wrote in the mid-Twenties that “the Negro to-day wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and short comings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival...