Benjamin Griffith Brawley

Benjamin Griffith Brawley (April 22, 1882 – February 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 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, "... a well-known educator and writer, Brawley declined the second-place award because, he said, he had never done anything but first-class work."

Biography

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 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. At that school, the term was limited to five months and his salary to no more than thirty dollars a month.

Publications and selected writings

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. 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. 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. Three Negro Poets: Horton, Mrs. Harper, and Whitman. The Journal of Negro History 2.4 (1917): 384-392.

Newspapers and periodicals

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

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

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

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.