Claude Brown

Writer and educator

• Born: February 23, 1937
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: February 2, 2002
• Place of death: New York, New York

Brown is best known for his revealing autobiographical novel, Manchild in the Promised Land(1965). Widely regarded as a definitive picture of life in Harlem, Brown’s book vividly depicts what it is to be black, urban, and poor. His second major book, The Children of Ham(1976), continues his exploration of how impoverished children grow up and describes the ability of the young to rise above their environment. Both books are marked by underlying optimism and reflect Brown’s own struggle from early hopelessness to a productive life.

Early Life

Claude Brown was born to Henry Lee and Ossie Brock Brown in the last years of the Great Depression. Two years before Brown’s birth, Henry Lee and Ossie had joined the Great Migration north in the hope of finding economic opportunities in the “promised land” of were chosen. Instead, they found life hard and cold in the Harlem tenements; Henry Lee toiled as a railroad worker and Ossie cleaned homes. The couple retained many of their South Carolina ways, which became a source of embarrassment and estrangement for Brown, an urban “manchild.”

Bright and restless, Brown had little interest in school and became involved in gang activity at the age of nine. He was sent to a series of juvenile detention centers for theft and, importantly, to Wiltwyck, a school for “deprived and emotionally disturbed” boys in Ulster County, New York, cofounded by Eleanor Roosevelt. At Wiltwyck, the eleven-year-old met Dr. Ernest Papanek, a psychologist and Holocaust survivor who became one of his mentors. However, on release from Wiltwyck, Brown returned to his criminal associations and began dealing drugs. At thirteen, he was shot during an attempted robbery. Subsequently sent to the Warwick School for Boys, Brown found the facility filled with friends from the streets. Warwick became yet another environment in which to learn new crime strategies. It was also a place where he was encouraged to read autobiographies and biographies of famous African Americans by a staff member.

As a teenager, Brown was introduced by friends to the Coptic and Muslim religions, both of which had crucial links to a growing sense of black identity and pride among the residents of Harlem. Shocked by the grip heroin had on his peers (and his younger brother), Brown moved to Greenwich Village when he was seventeen in an attempt to retire from the street life that had driven him for a decade. The teenager supported himself in a series of jobs—from busboy to clerk in a watch repair shop to cosmetics salesman—and began taking night school classes to complete his high school diploma. While taking classes, Brown met a Jewish music student with whom he had an intense, six-month romance that her parents ended suddenly, leaving Brown disillusioned about the possibilities of racial equity.

Life’s Work

Brown always had a quick, inquisitive mind. As a young adult, he learned to play jazz piano, speak French, and write essays as easily as he had learned to steal and deal drugs as a child. When Brown was twenty-one, supported by a scholarship from the Metropolitan Community Methodist Church, he began his studies at Howard University, majoring in government and business. An eager student at this point in his life, Brown was inspired by his classes with the novelist Toni Morrison and sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Nathan Hare. In 1961, Brown married Helen Jones, a telephone operator, and the couple became parents of a daughter (Denise) and a son (Nathaniel). In his first year at Howard, Brown was contacted by Papanek, who had noticed Brown’s promise as a child at Wiltwyck. The psychologist urged Brown to write an essay about his experiences growing up in Harlem for the magazine Dissent. The power of that short autobiographical piece led Macmillan editor Bram Cavin to propose that the young writer turn the article into a book. Brown was given a substantial advance and two years later delivered a 1,537-page manuscript. Working with editor Alan Rinzler, Brown turned that manuscript into a classic African Americancoming-of-age story: Manchild in the Promised Land (1965).

The same year that Brown’s best-seller was published, the young author graduated from Howard and subsequently began studies in law at Stanford University, then Rutgers University. Instead of following a career in law or politics as he had originally planned, Brown became a highly paid, well-regarded lecturer, discussing issues of criminal justice and rehabilitation, with special attention to the problems of at-risk youths in urban centers riddled with drugs and violence. He not only brought news of the plight of urban youths to a broad audience, but he also remained in contact with troubled young people, often visiting juvenile detention facilities, prisons, and rehabilitation centers.

Brown ran unsuccessfully for the Harlem congressional seat famously held by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. He urged Americans to volunteer in inner-city neighborhoods, lobbied for the decriminalization of drugs, and supported numerous mentoring and rehabilitation programs for youths in Harlem and Newark, New Jersey.

Brown’s second book, The Children of Ham (1976), is a series of vignettes in which the author follows the lives of thirteen African American teenagers as they struggle with poverty and drugs in crime-infested Harlem. Although focusing on similar subject matter to the autobiographical Manchild in the Promised Land, Children of Ham did not enjoy the same success. In articles published in popular magazines, including The New York Times Magazine, Life, Look, and Esquire, and in the sixty-minute documentary Manchild Revisited: A Commentary by Claude Brown (1991), the writer decried the lack of opportunities for urban black youths and the resulting culture of crime. In his third (never completed) book, Brown compared the lives of young people struggling amid the 1980’s crack cocaine epidemic in Harlem with his own childhood and adolescence in Harlem during the 1940’s and 1950’s. In 2002, Brown died of respiratory failure in New York.

Significance

Although Brown was a popular and influential lecturer, teacher, and essayist for decades, he is most remembered for the frank, shocking account of his early life on the streets of Harlem during the 1940’s and 1950’s. Appearing at the height of the Civil Rights movement, the instant best seller connected with a national curiosity about black urban life and provided a tale of success despite tremendous odds. The book became required reading for generations of young Americans. Brown’s adroit use of colloquial language, his blunt descriptions of the seductions of street life and the inability of prisons to change behavior, and the sense of irony with which he represents his youthful attitudes all contribute to the continuing appeal of a book that ranks alongside the work of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.

Bibliography

Brown, Claude. Manchild in the Promised Land. 1965. Reprint. New York: Touchstone, 2000. Brown’s influential and autobiographical novel about crime and violence in Harlem.

Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. Butterfield considers Brown an important contributor to black autobiography in a period of “reawakened political commitment” and discusses Manchild in a section on satire.

Goldstein, Richard. “The Riot of ’43.” In Helluva Town: The Story of New York City During World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Brown’s recollections are included in this account of a Harlem riot sparked by a confrontation between an African American soldier and a white police officer. This chapter and the preceding one, “Harlem Seethes,” provide useful context for Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land.