May Day Musing on Sterling Brown
Literary Champion of the
Black Working Class
by ‘bro. zayid’
Several months ago, I was asked if I
could do a poem that affirmed the dignity and the strength of the Black man for
a funeral for an ol’ school race man who just passed away…His name was Samuel
Stubbs, an entrepreneurial pioneer, the big brother of Rev. Ruth Stubbs Jones,
and the uncle of Dr. Tammarrah Jones, Rev. Jones’ daughter.
I love and cherish them both dearly.
The piece I came up with was not
anything I did.
I chose a classic instead. A piece
simply called Strong Men by the incredible Sterling A. Brown, a legend of the
marvel Black language and master teacher who to this day has not gotten the
respect and appreciation he is due.
Standing squarely on the shoulders
of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poetic bridge from the 19th to the 20th
century, Brown, whose lyricism was thick with what Africentrists began to
recently call Ebonics, dared to assert that such speech, such language, such
expression was an ample, virile and legitimate carrier of a working class
culture of a working class that had been worked and exploited like no other
working class in the world, the Black working class that been worked for nearly
three centuries as slaves and beyond as
consequence of its residual legacy of Jim Crow terrorism, prison concentration
labor, (growing in the last 30 years like it is hasn’t since the end of
Reconstruction now by the way) and urban proletariat labor.
For several generations, he also
taught some of the baddest champions of struggle and the arts to come through
Howard University. I’m sure heard of Amiri Baraka, the Father of the Black Arts
Movement, Nathan Heard, the Father of Black Studies and Kwame Ture, the
champion of Black Power, among a whole lot more.
Sterling Brown was a baaad man!
He was joined in his pioneering
efforts by another unsung giant of language…Paul Robeson. Robeson was doing
with song, using our spirituals and work songs, what Brown was doing with
poetry!
Sterling Brown also had the audacity
to attack the cornerstones of American poetry to dare make his statements much
like what young filmmaker Nate Parker just did with his epic film on Nat
Turner!
Let’s make it plain.
Parker didn’t just do an epic film
on one of the most feared moments in American history. He took the language and
title from an American epic that denigrated Black culture and struggle like no
other film. We are referring here to the early 20th century Birth Of
A Nation by DW Griffith done in 1915. This film is considered the birth of the
American epic in film and considered one of the greatest films of its kind of
all time. It is a must study film that all American filmmaking students must go
thru to get going.
There’s a catch, however. Birth Of A
Nation is also the ugly white mother of all racist film! It captures and
projects all of the worst stereotypes ever conjured up to humiliate our people!
It literally turns the short-lived and politically aborted Reconstruction into
a coon spectacle projecting the sexually obsessed Black Buck stereotype
obsessed with devouring white women! It literally glorifies the emergence and
the terror role of the KuKluxKlan!...It is so cherished in the acidic lie of
American racist lore that it was given a special private screening at the White
House by Jersey’s segregationist president Woodrow Wilson!
Now Parker does it with America’s
only Black president in the White House, and he still was racked over the coals
by the media industry for daring to do what he did.
Brown pens Strong Men in 1931 and
takes his title from a gem in American poetry…a piece by the same name done by
Carl Sandburg, a piece that glorifies the American frontiersman, no matter that
that legacy was soaked in the genocide of America’s Indigenous population and
our ancestors’ bloody bondage.
Nineteen Thirty One! It was the
height of the Depression, a time when angry white men were lynching Black men
with impunity and nothing short of genocidal regularity! Nevertheless, it was with
proud and dignified audacity that Sterling Brown comes and turns an American
classic on its head to celebrate the most despised segment of the population…the
Black man!
How incredible is it that this tart
tongue for his people would be born on May 1st, 1901, May Day! A day
born in the blood of exploited labor seeking dignity and justice for labor all
over the world…
This May Day, I take a moment to
salute the poetic champion of the Black Working Class…Sterling A. Brown…
Enjoy his insurgent classic Strong
Men…
STRONG MEN (1931)
STERLING
BROWN
The
strong men keep coming on.
They
dragged you from homeland,
They
chained you in coffles,
They
huddled you
spoon-fashion
in filthy hatches,
They
sold you to give a few gentlemen ease.
They
broke you in like oxen,
They
scourged you,
They
branded you,
They
made your women breeders,
They
swelled your numbers with bastards. . . .
They
taught you the religion they disgraced.
You
sang:
Keep a-inchin’ along
Lak a po’ inch worm. . . .
You
sang:
Bye and bye
I’m gonna lay down dis heaby
load. . . .
You
sang:
Walk togedder, chillen,
Dontcha git weary. . .
The
strong men keep a-comin’ on
The
strong men git stronger.
They
point with pride
to
the roads you built for them,
They
ride in comfort
over
the rails you laid for them.
They
put hammers in your hand
And
said ⎯
Drive so much before sundown
You
sang:
Ain’t no hammah In dis lan’,
Strikes lak mine, bebby,
Strikes lak mine.
They
cooped you in their kitchens,
They
penned you in their factories,
They
gave you the jobs
that
they were too good for,
They
tried to guarantee happiness to themselves
By
shunting dirt and misery to you.
You
sang:
Me an’ muh baby gonna shine,
shine
Me an’ muh baby gonna shine.
The
strong men keep a-comin’ on
The
strong men git stronger. . . .
They
bought off some of your leaders
You
stumbled, as blind men will . . .
They
coaxed you,
unwontedly
soft-voiced. . . .
You
followed a way.
Then
laughed as usual.
They
heard the laugh and wondered;
Uncomfortable,
Unadmitting
a deeper terror. . . .
The
strong men keep a-comin’ on Gittin’
stronger. . . .
What,
from the slums
Where
they have hemmed you,
What,
from the tiny huts
they
could not keep from you ⎯
What reaches them
Making
them ill at ease, fearful?
Today
they shout prohibition at you
“Thou shalt not this”
“Thou shalt not that”
“Reserved for whites only”
You
laugh.
One thing
they cannot prohibit ⎯
The strong men . . .
coming on
The strong men gittin’
stronger.
Strong men. . . Stronger. . .
