Frank London Brown

Frank London Brown (born October 7, 1927 in Kansas City (Missouri) , † March 12, 1962 in Chicago ) was an African American writer. He was best known for his novel Trumbull Park (1959). Based on his own experience, he describes the situation of African-American families who moved to the Trumbull Park Homes settlement in Chicago, which until then was only inhabited by whites, in 1953/54 . These first attempts at racial integration sparked the racially motivated Trumbull Park Homes Race Riots , which form the background of the novel. Although Brown's work was also forgotten as a result of his early death, he is considered an important voice in the Chicago Black Renaissance .

Life

Brown was the oldest of three children. Due to racial discrimination in the American southern states , his family moved to Illinois in 1939 , where they settled in the slums of the South Side of Chicago. Here Brown attended Colman Elementary School and then DuSable High School , the first high school for African American in Chicago. After graduating from high school in 1945, Brown began studying at Wilberforce University in Ohio . In January 1946 he joined the US Army , where he sang in a band.

In late 1947, Brown married and used the GI Bill to continue studying. He attended Roosevelt University and made a living for himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs. In 1951 he received his BA. In 1954 he studied law at Kent College in Chicago. He has written, done odd jobs, been a machinist, sales representative, bartender, clerk, jazz singer, and organizer for the United Packinghouse Workers of America and other unions. Brown received an MA from the University of Chicago in 1960 and began a PhD in political science. After the publication of his novel Trumbull Park (1959) he was accepted as a member of the Committee on Social Thought of the University of Chicago under John U. Nef . He also directed the university's union research center. He was diagnosed with leukemia in the summer of 1961 , from which he died less than a year later.

plant

Brown was shaped by his time on the South Side of Chicago. His high school had a wide range of music on offer, and Brown heard records by jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie , Thelonious Monk , Charlie Parker , Muddy Waters and Joe Williams . During his studies he wrote short stories , which he also read about jazz music in the Gate of Horn music club. He has also written for the Chicago Sun-Times , the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Defender . From November 1958 he worked for Ebony magazine

An early publication was Brown's short story Night March (1957), which deals with lynching and African American solidarity in the South. His portrait of the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, which he published in the magazine Down Beat in 1958 under the title More Man than Myth , became famous . An interview with singer Mahalia Jackson ( Mahalia the Great ) appeared in Ebony in 1959 .

Brown's first novel, Trumbull Park (1959) described the fate of an Afro-American family who moved from the slums to the model settlement Trumbull Park Homes, which until then was exclusively inhabited by whites . The fact that African-American families were allowed to move to Trumbull Park sparked racially motivated riots in 1953 and 1954 and caused sustained tension into the 1960s, so that the black families required permanent police protection. Brown, who lived in Trumbull Park with his wife and three daughters from 1954 to 1957, processed his own experiences and campaigned for political activism within the legal framework. The realistic novel influenced by Richard Wright in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair found literary recognition at the time, sold more than 25,000 copies and made Brown an important author of the early civil rights movement . In the long term, however, the novel was not noticed. The literary scholar Mary Helen Washington recognized him in 1999 as an attempt to portray the characters as part of a community. The political activism of women will also be the focus. With its emphasis on community, the novel challenged the then dominant aesthetic of individualism, as expressed in Ralph Ellison's canonical novel Invisible Man .

In 1959, Brown published three short stories in various magazines and shortly before his death the short stories McDougal (1961; 1964 as The Whole Truth ) and A Matter of Time (1962). The essay An Unaccountable Happiness (1962) and the stories Singing Dinah's Song (1963) and The Ancient Book (1964) were published posthumously . The second novel published in 1969 was The Myth Maker , a text that Brown had submitted as work for his MA at the University of Chicago in 1960. Much like Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel Guilt and Atonement , Brown outlines self-hatred as a cause of moral degeneration and crime by following the fate of his protagonist, Ernest Day, who murders an old man he is unfamiliar with.

Brown is considered an important author of the Black Chicago Renaissance, whose early death prevented further fame. In October 1998 he was inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writes of African Descent . The Northeastern University Press in 2005 published a scientific edition of Trumbull Park with a foreword by Mary Helen Washington.

Works

• Trumbull Park. A novel. Regnery, Chicago 1959; Northeastern University Press, Boston, Mass. 2005, ISBN 9781555536282 .
  • German by Maria Dessauer: Trumbull Park . Josef Knecht, Frankfurt / M. 1961.
    • Chicago blues. Novel. The Book Community, Vienna 1964.
    • Chicago blues. Novel. Verl. Volk u. Welt, Berlin 1964.
    • Negroes undesirable. Novel about the racial conflict in America = Trumbull park. Swiss People's Book Community, Lucerne 1965.
• Short stories. 2nd Edition. Frank London Brown Historical Association, Chicago 1969.
• The myth maker. A novel. Path Press, Chicago 1969.

In anthologies

• Ulli Beier (Ed.): Black Orpheus. An anthology of new African and Afro-American stories. 1st edition. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York 1965.
• Langston Hughes (Ed.): The best short stories by Negro writers. An anthology from 1899 to the present. 1st edition. Little, Brown and Company, Boston 1967.
• Wayne Charles Miller (Ed.): A gathering of ghetto writers: Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black, and Puerto Rican. New York University Press, New York 1972, ISBN 9780814753583 .
• John Henrik Clarke (Ed.): Black American short stories. One hundred years of the best. Hill and Wang, New York 1993.
• Sascha Feinstein and David Rife (Eds.): The jazz fiction anthology. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2009, ISBN 0253221374 .

literature

• Michael D. Hill: Frank London Brown (October 7, 1927-March 12, 1962) . In: Steven C. Tracy (Ed.): Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance . University of Illinois Press, Chicago 2011, pp. 121-133.
• Charles Tita: Frank London Brown. In: Emmanuel S. Nelson (Ed.): Contemporary African American Novelists . Greenwood Press, Wetsport, CT 1999, pp. 58-63.
• Mary Helen Washington: Desegragating the 1950s. The Case of Frank London Brown . In: The Japanese Journal of American Studies No. 10 (1999) pp. 15-32. ( PDF ).

Web links

• Brown, Frank London . In: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mary Helen Washington Desegragating the 1950s. The Case of Frank London Brown . In: The Japanese Journal of American Studies No. 10 (1999) pp. 22-25.
2. ↑ Michael D. Hill: Frank London Brown (October 7, 1927 – March 12, 1962) . In: Steven C. Tracy (Ed.): Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance . University of Illinois Press, Chicago 2011, pp. 130 f.