Sterling Brown and the New Negro Movement

The Harlem Renaissance, or as it was called at the time, the New Negro Movement focused itself on just that: the idea of a “new negro”. Black thinkers attempted to prove themselves on the literary and poetic battlefield that had until that point been dominated by whites. Many figures associated with the New Negro Movement agreed with its bold and noble aspirations, but were a bit more apprehensive regarding the means used to achieve those ends. Poet-scholar Sterling A. Brown was among these critics who saw the measures taken by his contemporaries as moves towards assimilation, rather than toward enlightenment or true personal expression. In an attempt to return to what he saw as the foundation of the black literary and poetic tradition, Brown published Southern Road in 1932. The collection contains poems written mostly in dialect on the subject of rural southern life, often structured similarly to the blues ballads of the sojourning southern negro that Brown felt was being ignored or obscured, either intentionally or not, by the mainstream New Negro Movement. Chief among these poems is the appropriately titled Southern Road. The poem looks at first glance like the lyrics to one of the aforementioned blues tunes, and features onomatopoeia throughout. Each of its seven stanzas deals with another facet of the narrator’s miserable life, all being recounted as he swings his hammer and pulls his chain under the hot sun. Brown is attempting to recontextualize and revitalize what he sees as the purest and most authentic form of black expression, and to secure its place in the black literary canon.
There are several aspects of Southern Road that are centrally important to understanding the work. Arguably chief among them is the dialectic style of the poem itself. The poem is written in such a way that the reader cannot help