Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
"Manchild in the Promised Land" by Claude Brown is a powerful autobiography that chronicles the author's tough upbringing in Harlem during the mid-20th century. Published in 1965, the book gained prominence for its raw and realistic depiction of life in the ghetto, capturing the challenges faced by young Black men in America. Brown's narrative begins with a dramatic event—a shooting at the age of thirteen—and unfolds to illustrate the struggles of poverty, crime, and violence that pervaded his environment.
Despite the overwhelming odds and temptations surrounding him, Brown's journey is one of resilience and transformation. He navigates a chaotic childhood marked by delinquency and neglect, ultimately seeking a way out of the cycle of despair. His departure from Harlem leads to significant milestones, including education and personal development, culminating in his acceptance into Howard University and later law school. While the book does not prescribe a straightforward path to success, it serves as a testament to the possibility of overcoming adversity and forging a positive identity against significant societal challenges. This compelling memoir resonates particularly with those interested in the historical context of civil rights and the African American experience in urban America.
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Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown
First published: 1965
The Work
Claude Brown’s classic autobiography Manchild in the Promised Land is a quintessentially American story of hardship and disadvantage overcome through determination and hard work, but with a critical difference. It became a best-seller when it was published in 1965 because of its startlingly realistic portrayal of growing up in Harlem. Without sermonizing or sentimentalizing, Brown manages to evoke a vivid sense of the day-to-day experience of the ghetto, which startled many readers and became required reading, along with The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), for many civil rights activists.
Manchild in the Promised Land describes Brown’s resistance to a life path that seemed predetermined by the color of his skin and the place he was born. In the tradition of the slave narrative of the nineteenth century, Brown sets about to establish his personhood to a wide audience, many of whom would write him off as a hopeless case. The book opens with the scene of Brown being shot in the stomach at the age of thirteen after he and his gang are caught stealing bed sheets off a laundry line. What follows is the storyline most would expect of a ghetto child—low achievement in school, little parental supervision, and a sense of hopelessness about the future. There are crime, violence, and drugs lurking in every corner of Harlem, and young Sonny (Claude) falls prey to many temptations.
In spite of spending most of his early years committing various petty crimes, playing hooky from school, living in reform schools, and being the victim of assorted beatings and shootings, Brown manages to elude the destiny of so many of his boyhood friends—early death or successively longer incarcerations. Sensing that he would perish, literally or figuratively, if he remained on the path that seemed destined for him, he leaves Harlem for a few years and begins to chart a different outcome for his life, which includes night school, playing the piano, graduating from Howard University, and beginning law school.
Although Brown offers no formula for escaping the devastation that so often plagues ghetto life, he shows by example that it is possible to succeed in constructing, even in the ghetto, a positive identity.
Bibliography
Brown, Claude. The Children of Ham. New York: Stein & Day, 1976. The author’s nonfiction account of the life of African American children in New York’s ghettos.
Davis, Charles T. Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981. Edited by Henry L. Gates, Jr. New York: Garland, 1982. Davis contrasts the use of sexuality in novels by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, using Claude Brown’s work as part of his analysis. Davis contends that Brown, when compared to other black writers of his time, may appear as a “raving sensualist” because of his graphic and frequent allusions to the sexual aspect of black culture.
Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940-1980: A Comprehensive History and Crit-ical Evaluation. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Karl discusses Brown’s work in the context of the “journalistic fiction” of the latter part of the twentieth century. He also examines Brown’s motives for working with the first-person narrative and using the author as subject.
Ostendorf, Berndt. Black Literature in White America. Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1982. In an essay entitled “Contemporary Afro-American Culture: The Sixties and Seventies,” Ostendorf quotes from Brown in regard to the black literary movement in those two decades, which Ostendorf contends saw an explosive exposure for African American culture. He argues that Brown and others, from musicians such as Otis Redding and Ray Charles to writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks, fed the fire.
Petesch, Donald A. A Spy in the Enemy’s Country. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. Petesch traces the evolution of self and personality in black literature from Frederick Douglass to modern writers. Manchild in the Promised Land is included in a discussion of the question of “disappearing selves” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and other representative works. Petesch’s argument is that the main characters in these works, Brown’s included, do not surrender self but rather continue to survive and fight.