In the early 1940s, Sterling A. Brown earnestly began collecting materials that would expand the brief representation of African Americans in the region that Jonathan Daniels impressionistically described in his A Southerner Discovers the South (1938). Brown studiously examined published texts on the matter, and, more important, he personally explored the region with a poet’s eye, absorbing African American customs, mores, life, language, and lore. As he encountered more and richly diverse experiences, he complained to his wife, Daisy, that there was too much. The Southern landscape’s legacy of awesome beauty and its anguished tragedy were aesthetically and emotionally overwhelming. He nevertheless wrote in different expressive modes to capture and present the breadth and depth of the experiences he embraced. The results are preserved in his body of papers and manuscripts collected in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.
To organize the disparate pieces to this project, Brown created six different tables of contents. From them, we infer Brown was troubled by the challenge to discover an organizing principle and to bring coherence to the flood of observations and feelings that showered him with fresh insights into the complexity of black Southern social and cultural diversity. To that extent, we have endeavored to complete what a penchant for comprehensiveness and perfection prevented Brown from doing: making the difficult editorial choices that would allow the many parts to coalesce into a cohesive whole.
First, we had to decide which essays to include and to exclude. We were naturally drawn to the completed, unpublished essays in his manuscript collection and to the previously published ones, which appeared in such periodicals as Survey Graphic, Phylon, The Record Changer, and The South Today. Our next decision was how to arrange the different pieces topically. In making these choices, we used his tables of contents as guides in creating six sections for the book. In two instances, the sections that Brown proposed contained only two or so short essays. Thus we combined these obvious fragments into logical wholes, grouping the essays most related to each other. Brown provided no prologue for the collection, so we created one that would assist the reader in understanding the purpose of the text. However, “Count Us In,” which Brown proposed as a coda to the volume and which first appeared as an essay in What the Negro Wants (1944), serves here as his intended epilogue.
To ensure uniformity and textual consistency, we made minor but necessary editorial changes to spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Many readers, we felt, might be unfamiliar with some terms deriving from a 1940s context. For that reason, “Annotations” contains a number of terms we glossed and placed at the end of the volume. In choosing them, we make no claim for comprehensiveness; we representatively selected ones that are likely to be most unfamiliar to today’s readers and that are most crucial to textual understanding. Last, for easy reference, we created topically a suggestive index of important names, places, and organizations.