Appreciation: Author Claude Brown offered promise

Fifteen years ago I met Claude Brown. In February 1987, the Harlem writer gave a lecture at my college and I was dispatched to write an article about it for the campus Black student newsletter. I was a bit apprehensive about the assignment. It was the first time I had ever written for a publication, and I hadn't yet read Brown's legendary 1965 novel Manchild in the Promised Land. All I knew was Brown was a writer, and he was Black. Brown, who died on Feb. 2 in New York, discussed many themes that evening: Ronald Reagan and racism in America, Black history and the difficulties Black students confront at predominantly white colleges like the one I was attending at the time - Frostburg State College in Maryland. Because of the "difficult" sub Brown raised, my article caused a minor controversy on campus. The student government association threatened to cut funding for the Black newsletter for the following year. We didn't lose our funding, but I found my calling. I knew then that I was going to be a writer.

When Brown passed recently at the age of 64, many writers I know began to discuss his contributions to African American literature. All of our conversations focused on one work - Manchild In the Promised Land. It is one of those books that every Black writer, including myself, eventually reads. Brown wrote Manchild while he was a student at Howard University. It is a semi-autobiographical novel about a young Black boy struggling against formidable obstacles in Harlem: drugs, gangs and poverty. But the young man endures, and, of course, he lives to tell a fictionalized version of his tale. Written in the authentic language of '60s-era Harlem, Brown's story stands beside other African American classics from the period such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley, and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver.

Over the years, Brown, who attended law school at Stanford and Rutgers universities, continued to write and lecture. A second book, The Children of Ham, was published in 1976, but it was already dear by then that with Manchild Brown had produced a timeless piece of work. With the exception of Ralph Ellison, Brown had done what few Black writers have ever been able to do: become a critical and commercial success with his first book-length publication. Anyone who has read Manchild In the Promised Land would understand why Brown felt a deep need to give of himself to try to spare today's youth the kind of destructive reality played out In his novel. It made sense, as Brown had been nurtured and saved by programs for young Black boys when he was a child. Brown eventually moved out of his beloved Harlem to Newark, N.J. But up until the end, he maintained youth programs in both of his hometowns.

- Brian Ollmore is a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer, writer and poet

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2002
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