ABSTRACT
This article considers the lasting impact of Sterling Brown’s poetry, criticism, and pedagogy on the culturally influenced politics and politics-infused expressive culture of the Black Power, Black Arts, and Black Studies movements. To a large degree what Brown bequeathed to Black Arts and Black Power was a way of thinking about Black cultural memory and a tradition of Black popular struggle in the sense of the struggle of a people for self-determination as expressed by the Black folk in art and culture. Brown’s work as a poet, critic, and teacher also left a lasting imprint on the Black Arts and Black Power activists’ sense of the meaning of Black culture, especially Black music. As Brown’s former student Amiri Baraka recalled, “Sterling began to give a few informal talks on this history as Black music, in the lounge of the old then new Cook Hall, and we sat, very literally, at his feet, taking those priceless teachings in.
