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= Benjamin_Griffith_Brawley =
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Introduction
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Benjamin Brawley
Benjamin Griffith Brawley (April 22, 1882February 1, 1939) was an
American author and educator. Several of his books were considered
standard college texts, including 'The Negro in Literature and Art in
the United States' (1918) and 'New Survey of English Literature'
(1925).
Born in 1882 in Columbia, South Carolina, Brawley was the second son
of Edward McKnight Brawley and Margaret Dickerson Brawley. He studied
at Atlanta Baptist College (renamed Morehouse College), graduating in
1901, earned his second BA in 1906 from the University of Chicago, and
received his master's degree from Harvard University in 1908. Brawley
taught in the English departments at Atlanta Baptist College, Howard
University, and Shaw University.
He served as the first dean of Morehouse College from 1912 to 1920
before returning to Howard University in 1937 where he served as chair
of the English department. He wrote a good deal of poetry, but is best
known for his prose work including: 'History of Morehouse College'
(1917); 'The Negro Literature and Art' (1918); 'A Short History of the
American Negro' (1919); 'A Short History of the English Drama' (1921);
'A Social History of the American Negro' (1921); 'A New Survey of
English Literature' (1925). In 1927, Brawley declined Second award
and Bronze medal awarded to him by the William E. Harmon Foundation
Award for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes: "... a well-known
educator and writer, Brawley declined the second-place award because,
he said, he had never done anything but first-class work."
Education and early life
==========================
As a child, Benjamin Brawley learned that all men come from clay and
that none of them should look up or down at each other, which kept him
from approaching life with a pretentious attitude despite coming from
a well-off family. Brawley started developing a deep concern for
people as a result of his interactions with children who were less
privileged than he was, and his interest in people's life conditions
is believed to have been consequential in his career as a teacher and
a scholar. Brawley's father was an educated man, and Brawley was one
of nine children in the family. Because of his father's position as a
church minister, Brawley's family has had to relocate on many
occasions in when he was a child. Brawley's education started in his
home where his mother served as his teacher until his family moved to
Nashville, Tennessee, where he was admitted into third grade. During
his time in Nashville, despite going to a normal school, Brawley's
mother still read Bible stories and verses with him on Sundays. As the
son of a minister, Brawley studied Latin when he was twelve years old
at Peabody Public School in Petersburg, Virginia, and he learned Greek
when he was 14 years old with his father. Brawley's father introduced
him to the story of The Merchant of Venice, and he moved on to read
stories, such as, Sanford and Merton and The pilgrim's Progress in
addition to romantic stories that he read outside his family's
library.
In his adolescence, Brawley spent most of his summers earning from
different jobs; he spent one summer working on a Connecticut tobacco
farm, two summers at a printing office in Boston, and he spent some
time as a driver for a white physician; besides his working summers,
he spent the other half of his free time studying privately to get
ahead at school. Brawley entered the Atlanta Baptist Seminary
(Morehouse College), where he became aware of the educational
discrepancies in the community, at the age of thirteen -- most of his
older classmates did not know much about classical literature or
languages, such as Greek and Latin, which he knew plenty about. During
his time at Morehouse, Brawley not only excelled in his studies but he
also assisted his classmates by revising their written assignments
before they submitted them to their professors. Besides his academic
excellence, Brawley displayed significant leadership qualities; he
managed Morehouse's baseball team; he served as quarterback for the
football team and as a foreman for the College Printing Office.
Additionally, he and another student founded 'The Atheneum', a student
journal that later became 'Maroon Tiger', in 1898, and this journal
featured 'A Prayer,' which Brawley wrote as a response to a lynching
that happened in Georgia.
Career and later years
========================
Brawley graduated from The Atlanta Baptist Seminary with honors in
1901, and soon after, he launched his teaching career at Georgetown in
a one-room school a few miles from Palatka, Florida where he cared for
about fourteen children from first to eighth grade. At that school,
the term was limited to five months and his salary to no more than
thirty dollars a month. While Brawley received a more lucrative job
offer right after signing with Georgetown, because he did not want to
break a contract at the start of his career, he decided to honor his
contract with Georgetown and turned down a contract that would allow
him to work for longer school terms and that would significantly
increase his monthly pay. After the end of the school term and a year
since he began his contract, Brawley headed to Atlanta for a teaching
position at his former school, The Atlanta Baptist Seminary, where he
continued to teach English for about eight years. While teaching at
The Atlanta Baptist Seminary, Brawley pursued a Bachelor of Arts
degree and a Master of Arts degree, for which he completed most of the
classes during summer sessions. In 1806, he received his Bachelor of
Arts degree from the University of Chicago, and in 1808, he received
his Master of Arts from Harvard University.
In 1910, Brawley accepted an invitation to become a part of the
faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he met a
Jamaican lady from Kingston with the name Hilda Damaris Prowd who
would later become his wife. In response to their first meeting,
Brawley wrote the sonnet First Sight. Prowd and Brawley shared common
interests in travels, operas, reading. and hosting friends. Brawley
and Prowd left Washington to move back to Atlanta, where Brawley was
returning to teach English at The Atlanta Baptist Seminary (Morehouse
College) and serve as the first dean of the institution. During his
first year there since returning, he taught six classes every day in
addition to other teaching tasks.
Brawley went to the Republic of Liberia in Africa to conduct an
educational survey in 1920. Sometime after his trip, Brawley decided
to become a minister just like his father in early 1921. Thus, he
moved on to serve as a Baptist minister for The Messiah Congregation
in Boston, Massachusetts. A year later, he resigned from his position
as a minister and returned to teaching because of incompatibility
issues with the congregation's Christianity. After quitting his
ministerial position, Brawley went to teach at Shaw University in
North Carolina, and a few years later, in 1931, he accepted a teaching
position at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he resided
until his death in 1939.
Publications and selected writings
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*'A Toast to Eggs For Breakfast' (poems), Atlanta Baptist College,
1902.
*'The Problem, and Other Poems' (poems), Atlanta Baptist College,
1905.
*'A Short History of the American Negro', Macmillan, 1913; 4th revised
edition, 1939.
* [
https://books.google.com/books?id=IN3A94OoYTgC&dq History of
Morehouse College], Morehouse College (Atlanta, GA), 1917; reprinted,
McGrath Publishing, 1970.
*'Africa and the War', New York: Duffield and Company, 1918.
*'The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States', Duffield,
1918, revised edition, 1921; revised and retitled The Negro Genius: A
New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature
and the Fine Arts, Dodd, 1937; reprinted, Biblo & Tannen, 1966.
*'A Short History of the English Drama', Harcourt, 1921; reprinted,
Books for Libraries, 1969.
*'[
https://books.google.com/books?id=AVlvAzOKx04C&dq=benjamin+brawley
A Social History of the American Negro]', Macmillan, 1921; reprinted
AMS Press, 1971; reprinted Dover Publications, 2001. .
*'New Survey of English Literature: A Textbook for Colleges', Knopf,
1925, reprinted, 1930.
*'Freshman Year English', New York: Noble and Noble, Publishers, 1929.
*'A History of the English Hymn', Abingdon, 1932.
*(Editor) 'Early Negro American Writers', University of North Carolina
Press, 1935; reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1968.
*'Paul Laurence Dunbar, Poet of His People', University of North
Carolina Press, 1936, reprinted, Kennikat, 1967.
*'Negro Builders and Heroes', University of North Carolina Press,
1937; reprinted, 1965.
*'The Best stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar', New York: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1938.
*'The Seven Sleepers of Ephesys' (poems), Foote & Davis (Atlanta,
GA), 1971.
* [
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2713396?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Three Negro Poets: Horton, Mrs. Harper, and Whitman. 'The Journal of
Negro History' 2.4 (1917): 384-392.]
Newspapers and periodicals
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* The Springfield Republican (Springfield) "American Drama and the
Negro," II (1915), 9.
* The Watchman-Examiner (New York) "Hymn as Literature," XIX (1930),
6.
* The Athenaeum (Atlanta) "On Some Old Letters," XIV (1908), 6-8. "To
the Men of Atlanta Baptist College," XIII (1910), 21-23. "George Sale
and His Message to Atlanta Baptist College," XIV (1912), 48-50.
* The Bookman (New York) "The Negro in American Literature," LVI
(1922), 137-141.
* The Champion of Fair Play (Chicago) "American Ideals and the Negro,"
IV (1916), 31-32.
* The Christian Register (Boston) "What The War Did to Krutown," X
(1920), 33-35.
* The Crisis (New York) "Atlanta Striving," XXIIII (1914), 114-116.
* The Dial (Chicago) "The Negro in American Fiction," LX (1916),
445-450.
* The English Journal (Chicago) "The Negro in Contemporary
Literature," XVIII (1929), 194-202.
* The Harvard Advocate (Cambridge) "Varied Outlooks," LXXXIV (1907),
67-69.
* The Home Mission College Review (Raleigh) "Is The Ancient Mariner
Allegorical?" I (1927), 28-31. "Some Observations on High School
English," II (1928), 36-42.
* Journal of Negro History (Washington, D. C.) "Lorenzo Dow," I
(1916), 265-275. "Three Negro Poets: Horton, Mrs. Harper, and
Whitman," II (1917), 384-392. "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the
Negro," III (1918), 22-25. "The Promise of Negro Literature," XIX
(1934), 53-59.
* The Methodist Review (New York) "Wycliffe and the World War," IX
(1920), 81-83. "Our Religious Re-Adjustment," XIII (1924), 28-30.
* The New South (Chattanooga) "Recent Literature on the Negro," XIII
(1927), 37-41.
* The New Republic (New York) "Liberia One Hundred Years After," XXIV
(1921), 319 321.
* The North American Review (New York) "Blake's Prophetic Writing,"
XXI (1926-1927), 90-94. "The Southern Tradition," CCXXIV (1928),
309-315.
* The North American Student (New York) "Recent Movements among the
Negro People," III (1917), 8-11. (16) The Opportunity Magazine (New
York) "The Writing of Essays," IV (1926), 284-287. "Edmund T.
Jinkins," IV (1926), 383-385.
* The Reviewer (Chapel Hill) "A Southern Boyhood," V (1925), 1-8. "The
Lower Rungs of the Ladder," V (1925), 78-86. "On Re-Reading Browning,"
V (1925), 60-63.
* Sewanee Review (Sewanee) "English Hymnody and Romanticism," XXIV
(1916) 476 482. "Richard Le Gaillienne and the Tradition of Beauty,"
XXVI (1918), 47-60.
* The South Atlantic Quarterly (Durham) "Pre-Raphaelitism and Its
Literary Relations," XV (1916), 68-81.
* The Southern Workman (Hampton) "Our Debts," XLIV (1915), 622-626.
"The Negro Genius," XLIV (1915), 305-308. "The Course in English in
the Secondary School," XLV (1916), 495-498. "A Great Missionary," XLI
(1916), 675-677. "Meta Warrick Fuller," XLVII (1918), 25-32. "William
Stanley Braithwaite," XLVII (1918), 269-272. "Significant Verse,"
XLVIII (1919), 31-32. "Liberia Today," XLIX (1920), 181-183. "The
Outlook in Negro Education," XLIX (1920), 208-213. "Significant Days
in Negro History," LII (1923), 86-9"A History of the high school,"
LIII (1924), 545-549. "On the Teaching of English," LIII (1924),
298-304. "Not in Textbooks," LIV (1925), 34-37. "The Teacher Faces the
Student," LV (1926), 320-325. "Negro Literary Renaissance," LVI
(1927), 177-184. "The Profession of the Teacher," LVII (1928),
481-486. "Dinner at Talfourd's," LVIII (1929), 10-14. "Citizen of the
World," LIX (1930), 387-393. "The Dilemma for Educators," LIX (1930),
206-208. "Dunbar Thirty Years After," LIX (1930), 189-191. "Ironsides:
The Bordentown School," LXI (1931), 410-416. "Plea for Tory," LX
(1931), 297-301. "Art Is Not Enough," LXI (1932), 488-494. "Hamlet and
the Negro," LXI (1932), 442-448. "Whom Living We Salute," LXI (1932),
401-403. "A Composer of Fourteen Operas," LXII (1933), 43-44.
"Armstrong and the Eternal Verities," LXIII (1934), 80-87. "The
Singing of Spirituals," LXIII (1934), 209-213.
* The Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans) "Shakespeare's
Place in the Literature of the World," XLV (1916), 3-11.
* The Springfield Republican (Springfield) "David Lloyd George," X
(1923), 8.
* The Voice of the Negro (Atlanta) "Phillis Wheatley," II (1906),
55-59.
Poems in periodicals
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* The Athenaeum (Atlanta) "At Home and Abroad," II (1899), 7.
"Hiawatha," II (1899), 2. "Imperfection," II (1899), 4. "The Light of
Life," II (1899), 5. "The Light of the World," II (1899), 5. Reprint
in The Christian Advocate, (Chicago), XI (1920), 37. "Race Prejudice,"
II (1899), 9. "Bedtime," III (1900), 7. "Revocation," III (1900), 4.
"Samuel Memba," III (1900), 2. "T. W.," Ill (1900), 8. "As I Gaze into
the Night," IV (1901), 5. "The First of a Hundred Years," (Class
Song), IV (1901), 6. "Poems," IV (1901), 7 and 9. "After the Rain," VI
(1903), 7. "America," VI (1903), 2. "The Peon's Child," VII (1904), 6.
"My Hero," XVII (1914), 7. Reprint in The Home Mission College Review,
(Raleigh), I (1928), 30. "Shakespeare," XVIII (1916), 14. Reprint in
The Home Mission College Review, (Raleigh), II (1928), 26.
* The Christian Advocate (Chicago) "I Shall Go Forth in the Morning,"
XIII (1922), 18.
* Citizen (Los Angeles) "Ballade of One That Died Before His Time," IX
(1915), 27.
* Crisis (New York) "The Freedom of the Free," XX (1913), 32.
* The Harvard Monthly (Cambridge) "Chaucer," XLV (1908), 184.
* Lippincott's Magazine (Philadelphia) "Crossroads," LXXIV (1905),
731.
* Survey (New York) "Battleground," XL (1918), 608.
* The Voice of the Negro (Atlanta) "Christopher Marlowe," I (1904),
65. "The Plan," I (1904), 524. "The Education," II (1905), 319. "First
Sight," III (1906), 409. "To One Untrue," in (1906), 341. "Paul
Laurence Dunbar," III (1906), 265.
Songs
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* Song Collection Howard University Sings (edited), Washington, D. C.,
1912. Pp. 10. Brawley wrote three of the eleven songs in the
collection.
* "Anniversary Hymn," Atlanta: Atlanta Baptist College Press, 1917.
Written in response to the Fiftieth Anniversary of Morehouse College,
Atlanta, Georgia. Set to music by Kemper Harreld. "Anniversary Hymn,"
Raleigh, 1929. Written on the occasion of the Sixty-Third Annual
Founder's Day Celebration at Shaw University, Raleigh.
Edited works
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* Early Negro American Writers, Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1935.
* New Era Declamations, Sewanee: The University Press of Sewanee,
Tennessee, 1918.
* "The Baseball," Stories of the South, Chapel Hill : The University
of North Carolina Press, 1931.
* "The Baseball," America Through the Short Story, Boston: Little,
Brown, and Company, 1936.
* "The Negro in American Literature," The Bookman Anthology, New York:
George H. Doran Company, 1923.
Sources
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* Calo, Mary Ann. (2007). 'Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and
the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-40.'
University of Michigan Press.
Further reading
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*John W. Parker, "Phylon Profile XIX: Benjamin Brawley -- Scholar and
Teacher", 'Phylon' (1940-1956), Vol. 10, No. 1 (1st Qtr. 1949).
External links
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*
*
*
* [
http://www.answers.com/topic/benjamin-brawley Benjamin Brawley
Answers.com]
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