The enduring lessons of a New Deal writers project In 1937, Sterling A. Brown, a poet and literature professor at Howard University, published a forthright essay charting the history of Black life in his hometown of Washington, DC—from the district’s early status as the “very seat and center” of the domestic slave trade through the present-day effects of disenfranchisement and segregation. “In this border city, southern in so many respects, there is a denial of democracy, at times hypocritical and at times flagrant,” Brown wrote. “Social compulsion forces many who would naturally be on the side of civic fairness into hopelessness and indifference.”