Volume 36, Number 4 · March 16, 1989
The Last New Negro
By Darryl Pinckney
Sterling A. Brown was one of the few black writers of his generation who did not want to be part of the Harlem Renaissance. He was very proud that he had never shaken hands with Carl Van Vechten, who, he said, had done more than bad liquor to corrupt the Negro. The Harlem Renaissance was a publishers' gimmick, he said. It didn't last long enough to be called a renaissance, and very few Harlemites were in it. Black writers, he said, only went to Harlem for parties. Harlem was 'the show-window, the cashier's till.' While the young Niggerati were hovering around the tables of white patrons in Small's Paradise, Sterling himself was down in Lynchburg, Virginia, talking to a guitar player, Big Boy Davis, one of the rural characters whose ethos engaged Sterling's melancholy and rebellious sensibility, from which came a folk poetry of lasting originality.
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