Ross D. Brown and the Poetic Media of Black Socialism (original) (raw)

Abstract

As a young black radical active in Muncie, Indiana, Ross D. Brown (b. 1881) self-published several volumes of sonnets, ballads, and verse musings that recounted trade union struggles, offered treatises on socialism, and poetically tested the early twentieth century’s insuperable “color line.” A rising star in the Socialist Party of America, he won the support of Eugene V. Debs, whose “Introductory” graced the inset of each collection and announced Brown to the world as a “gifted young colored revolutionist” and a “propagandist of rare versatility” in whom “the colored people have [found] a champion worthy of their cause, and the same is true of the working class” (http://debs.indstate.edu/b880l3\_1916.pdf). As any good socialist of his day, Brown refused to distinguish poetry from his work as an orator, a fact reflected not only in theme and form but in the composition and dissemination of his poetry pamphlets, which acted as exigent party propaganda. My paper aims to revive, through Brown's propaganda poetry, this peculiarly wonderful moment when socialists embraced poetic imagination as an integral part of fomenting social change. While Brown’s “conventional” poetry aimed to combine readerly pleasure with a usable political message, he toed cautiously along the fragile class/race boundaries of the fractured, Progressive Era left. In poems such as “Socialism and the Negro,” “The Black Scab,” and “Master and Slave,” Brown signaled solidarity with a wide working-class audience by containing colloquial diction and labor struggle parlance within ballad forms. But while his verse made sustained appeals for racial empathy, Brown’s measured rhetoric all the time emphasized strategic power through unity, the need for workers of all races to unite against capitalist exploitation.

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